Zenon Pylyshyn


Zenon Walter Pylyshyn was a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964.
Pylyshyn's research generally involved the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He developed visual indexing theory which hypothesizes a pre-conceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly referring to the visual objects that could be interrogated by cognitive processes. His very influential multiple object tracking experiment methodology emerged from this work.

Early life and education

Pylyshyn was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to Ukrainian immigrants Anna and Yuriy. He obtained a degree in Engineering Physics from McGill University and in control systems and experimental psychology, both from the Regina Campus, University of Saskatchewan. His dissertation was on the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory.

Career

Pylyshyn was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964. He was then professor of Psychology and Computer Science, at the University of Western Ontario in London, from 1964 until 1994, where he also held honorary positions in Philosophy and Electrical Engineering and was director of the UWO Center for Cognitive Science. From 1985 to 1994, he directed the program in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
In 1994, he accepted positions as the Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science and as the director of the new Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In May 2016 Rutgers held a one-day "ZenFest", to commemorate his retirement.

Death

Pylyshyn died, on 6 December 2022, at Calvary Hospital in New York City.

Selected publications

Articles

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Books

Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science Meaning and Cognitive Structure: Issues in the Computational Theory of Mind The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence Perspectives on the Computer Revolution Computational Processes in Human Vision: An Interdisciplinary Perspective The Robot's Dilemma Revisited Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think
  • ''Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World''

As co-author

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