Name
Zenon Pylyshyn
Birth
School/tradition
analytic philosophy, rationalism, cognitivism, functionalism (philosophy of mind)
Main interests
vision, cognitive science, information theory
Influences
Jerry Fodor
Zenon Pylyshyn (born 1937) is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher.
He holds degrees in Engineering-Physics (B.Eng. 1959) from McGill University and in Control Systems (M.Sc. 1960) and Experimental Psychology (Ph.D. 1963), both from the University of Saskatchewan. His dissertation was on the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory. He was a Canada Council Senior fellow from 1963–1964.

Academic Career
Pylyshyn's most recent research involves the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He has also continued to develop his Visual Indexing Theory (sometimes called the FINST theory) which hypothesizes a preconceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly (or demonstratively) referring to the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes.

Selected Publications

List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates