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Zenon Pylyshyn | |
|---|---|
| Born | 25 August 1937 |
| Died | 6 December 2022 (aged 85) |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
Main interests | |
Notable ideas | Visual indexing theory |
Zenon Walter Pylyshyn[1] FRSC (/ˈzɛnən pəˈlɪʃən/; 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.