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Risto Näätänen, a renowned expert in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, was awarded an honorary doctorate on Friday, 23 March, at a midday event officiated by UB Rector Màrius Rubiralta in the UB’s Paranimf. During the ceremony, Dr Carles Escera of the Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology at the UB’s Psychology Faculty, acted as Prof Näätänen’s sponsor.
In the words of Dr Escera, “Prof Näätänen’s career as a scientist and scholar in the field of psychology should be situated at the point where human attention meets its underlying cerebral mechanisms as revealed by evoked potentials. His doctoral thesis, notably, put forward an experimental design for a study into selective attention that overcame methodological limitations at that time and still remains valid to this day. Also noteworthy was the early emergence of one of his great talents as a scientist: his capacity for both critical and breakthrough thinking.”
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Risto Näätänen, born in Helsinki in1939, has earned international recognition for his pioneering research on mismatch negativity, which is an electrophysiological response in brain activity elicited by a discernible change in a sequence of repetitive stimuli, occurring independently of the patient’s attention. Prof Näätänen, professor of the Academy of Finland and attached to the University of Helsinki, is considered a leading international authority in the field of cognitive neuroscience, a discipline that came into its own at the close of the 1970s as an outgrowth of experimental psychology, neuroscience and the cognitive sciences.
The discipline makes extensive use of evoked potentials, which are the electrophysiological responses made by the brain in the presence of sensory stimuli or cognitive processes. One of these responses, the mismatch negativity (MMN) serves as an objective indicator of central auditory representation and is related to the cerebral circuits of exogenous attention control. “A simple set of data,” continued Dr Escera, “illustrates the size and scope of the research carried out by Prof Näätänen. A search on the key phrase ‘mismatch negativity’ in the database of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia gives 1,624 results and, of those, 414 are his. The papers he has published have so far been cited over 14,000 times, which puts him on the ISI’s list of most widely cited psychologists.”
"Prof Näätänen’s contributions,” added Dr Escera, “extend well beyond the field of basic experimental research in psychology and neuroscience. His concerns also include how new knowledge about brain function from MMN research may have implications and applications for clinical practice in fields as diverse as neurology, psychiatry and psychology.”
Author of over 400 scientific publications in highly influential journals, Prof
Näätänen has shown a great capacity for critical as well as breakthrough thinking. Among his many honours, he received the annual prize of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) in 1995 and, two years later, became the first recipient of the Scientific Award instituted by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Science to recognise the finest scientists of that country.
In his UB acceptance speech, Prof Näätänen said that “the aim of research in cognitive neuroscience is to reveal the cerebral processes underlying our cognitive operations, such as perception, attention and memory, and it has been one of the areas of neuroscience to advance most rapidly. This progress is based principally on the development of new research technologies in neuroscience that have made brain function virtually transparent. The partnership between the Universities of Barcelona and Helsinki has proven especially fruitful in this area of research.”
Referring to mismatch negativity (MMN), Prof Näätänen explained to the audience how “the proper functioning of the involuntary attention switching mechanism is important even in our daily lives, for example, in social interactions. MMN responses in patients with schizophrenia appear to indicate that this mechanism is not functioning. Another key area for the application of MMN is in determining prognosis in comatose patients, say, as a result of a traffic accident or lack of oxygen. A further fundamental use of MMN concerns dyslexia. In dyslexic babies, the extent of MMN caused by a change in frequency is considerably attenuated. What is more, the extent of attenuation is correlated with the severity of the dyslexia. Lastly, MMN may prove useful in the research into ageing, a burning issue in the European Union today. For example, it lets us see how long auditory sensory memory traces last.” Photographs of the event are available at |
