Professor Emeritus of Psychology; Senior Research Scientist Emeritus, Mental Health Research Institute
About
Sylvan Kornblum is Professor Emeritus of Psychology in the department of Psychology and in the department of Psychiatry, and Senior Research Scientist Emeritus in the Molecular & Behavioral Neurosciences Institute (formerly the Mental Health Research Institute), at the University of Michigan.
He is a Cognitive Psychologist, received his BA in 195I from Washington University in St. Louis, MO., his MA in Philosophy in 1953, and his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1960 - the last two from the University of Michigan.
Following his Ph.D., he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Applied Psychology Research Unit of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England. Upon his return to the US, he accepted a position at the Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI) at the University of Michigan. Shortly thereafter, while on leave from MHRI, he was a Resident Visiting Scientist at the Human Information Processing Research Department of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. During that time, he was also a visiting fellow at the Information Processing Seminar in the department of Psychology at Yale University. Between 1984 and 1999, he spent part of every year as a Visiting Research Scientist at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Marseille, France.
He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science and a member of the Psychonomics Society. He is a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Attention and Performance, and was secretary-treasurer of the Association from 1972 to 1998.
He has been a referee for several federal granting agencies, on the editorial board, consulting editor and reviewer for a number of scientific publications..
His research has addressed fundamental problems in Reaction Time, Stimulus-Stimulus (S-S) and Stimulus-Response (S-R) Compatibility, Attention, and Motor control. He originated the Dimensional Overlap model, which, in a single cognitive framework, brings together many different types of (S-S) and (S-R) compatibility tasks, thus making it possible to compare their properties and processing characteristics. His research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Mental Health, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, and NATO.
Articles describing his research have been published in scientific journals such as Science, Psychological Review, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Acta Psychologica, Cognitive Psychology, Perception & Psychophysics, as well as chapters in volumes of the Attention and Performance series, and in Tutorials in Motor Neuroscience.
