Zenon Pylyshyn

Zenon Walter Pylyshyn (25 August 1937 – 6 December 2022) 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 (sometimes called the FINST theory) which hypothesizes a pre-conceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly (or demonstratively) referring to the visual properties encoded 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. He obtained a degree in Engineering Physics (BEng 1959) from McGill University and in control systems (MSc 1960) and experimental psychology (PhD 1963), 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.

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

Awards and honors
In 1990, the Canadian Psychological Association awarded him the Donald O. Hebb Award for "distinguished contributions to psychology as a science." He held fellowships in the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the MIT Center for Cognitive Science, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Canadian Psychological Association, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998. He was invited to give the Jean Nicod lectures in Paris in 2004. He has presided over both the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Cognitive Science Society.

Books

 * Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1984) ISBN 978-0-262-6605-87
 * Meaning and Cognitive Structure: Issues in the Computational Theory of Mind (Ablex Publishing, 1986) ISBN 978-0-893-9137-24
 * The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence (1987), Ablex Publishing, 1987) ISBN 0-893-9137-15
 * Perspectives on the Computer Revolution (with Leon J. Bannon, Intellect 1988) ISBN 978-0-893-9136-94
 * Computational Processes in Human Vision: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (ed. Zenon Pylyshyn, Intellect, 1988) ISBN 978-0-893-9146-08
 * The Robot's Dilemma Revisited (ed. Zenon Pylyshyn, with K. M. Ford, Ablex, 1996) ISBN 978-1-567-5014-21
 * Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think (MIT Press, 2004) ISBN 978-0-262-1621-73
 * Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World (MIT Press, 2007) (Jean Nicod Lecture Series) ISBN 978-0-262-5161-43