In Honor Of…Howard Egeth

Honoring scientists who have made important and lasting contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior.

Howard E. Egeth, PhD
Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Johns Hopkins University

 

Howard E. Egeth is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, with joint appointments in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience. He is a cognitive psychologist whose main research interests are in the general area of attention and perception. Some of his early work focused on issues of parallel and serial processing of distinct objects in the visual field as well as of the perceptual features that compose visual objects.  He is also well known for work on attentional selectivity and on the roles of top-down and bottom-up processes in the allocation of attention. In some recent work he has pointed to the role of ignoring as an active inhibitory process (and not simply the absence of attention); he has called this “the dark side of attention.”

Howard was born in 1940 in Irvington, New Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers University in 1961 as a psychology major (after spending his first two years studying physics at Caltech). He did his graduate work at the University of Michigan.  His advisor was Paul Fitts, but he also benefitted greatly from many other members of the faculty such as Arthur Melton, Jack Atkinson, Dave Birch, Dan Weintraub, Ward Edwards, Clyde Coombs, and Spike Tanner. He benefitted at least as greatly from interactions with his fellow students, including Ed Smith, Irv Biederman, Bob Crowder, and Amos Tversky.  He has also learned a lot from his wife, Sylvia, and his two children, Jill and Marc, both of whom have earned Ph. D.s in psychology.

After leaving Michigan in 1965 Howard joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins; he has been there ever since. He has been fortunate to have had many wonderful colleagues there over the years, as well as many outstanding students, both undergraduate and graduate. He served as department Chair for eleven years. (As evidence that no good deed goes unpunished, he also got to serve as Chair of the Department of Classics for two years.)

Howard is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science.  He has served on the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society, and was its Chair in 1996.  He has also served as President of Division 3 of the American Psychological Association.  He was President of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences, and was also President of the Foundation for the Advancement of the Behavioral and Brain Sciences; after some name changes and a consolidation, these two organizations are now FABBS (Federation of Association in the Behavioral & Brain Sciences).

 

 

Individuals Honoring Howard Egeth:  

Anonymous (1)
Larence Becker, Salisbury University
Irving Biederman, University of Southern California
Alfonso Caramazza, Harvard University
Marvin Chun, Yale University
Susan Courtney, Johns Hopkins University
Dale Dagenbach, Wake Forest University
Vincent Di Lollo, Simon Fraser University
Joshua Ewen, Kennedy Krieger Institute
Lisa Feigenson, Johns Hopkins University
Jonathan Flombaum, Johns Hopkins University
Charles Folk, Villanova University
Donald Foss, University of Houston
Bradley Gibson, University of Notre Dame
Grover Gilmore, Case Western Reserve University
Adam Greenberg, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Richard Haier, Johns Hopkins University
John Jonides, University of Michigan
Brian Keane, Rutgers University
Andrew Leber, Ohio State University
Carly Leonard, University of California Davis
Michael McCloskey, Johns Hopkins University
Jeff Moher, Williams College
Ernst Niebur, Johns Hopkins University
Molly Oliveri
J. Bruce Overmier, University of Minnesota
Stephen E. Palmer, University of California Berkeley
James R. Pomerantz, Rice University
Michael J. Proulx, University of Bath
Brenda Rapp, Johns Hopkins University
Amy Shelton, Johns Hopkins University
Benjamin Tamber-Rosenau, Vanderbilt University
Anne Treisman, Princeton University
*Jeremy Wolfe, Harvard University
Jack Yates, University of Northern Iowa

 * FABBS would like to thank Dr. Jeremy Wolfe for nominating Dr. Egeth for this honor and for leading the effort to spread the word about his nomination.