Axel Cleeremans (born 5 March 1962) is a Research Director with the
National Fund for Scientific Research
The National Fund for Scientific Research (NFSR) (Dutch: ''Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek'' (NFWO), French: ''Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique'' (FNRS)) was once a government institution in Belgium for supporting scien ...
(Belgium) and a professor of
cognitive science with the Department of Psychology of the
Université Libre de Bruxelles,
Brussels
Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...
.
Training
Born in
Brussels
Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...
,
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
, Cleeremans obtained an undergraduate degree in
Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...
at the
Université Libre de Bruxelles, he went on to obtain an MS degree in
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...
at
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
(
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...
,
PA). At Carnegie Mellon, he subsequently completed his PhD under the supervision of
James McClelland in 1991, on modelling of implicit sequence learning by means of
artificial neural network
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.
An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...
s. Thereafter he returned to the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he worked as a Senior Research Assistant for two years, before becoming head of the Cognitive Science Research Unit in 1993 (currently Consciousness, Cognition & Computation Group), as a Research Associate funded by the
National Fund for Scientific Research
The National Fund for Scientific Research (NFSR) (Dutch: ''Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek'' (NFWO), French: ''Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique'' (FNRS)) was once a government institution in Belgium for supporting scien ...
(currently as Research Director). In 2001-2002 he spent a year as a visiting scholar at the
University of Colorado at Boulder
The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sys ...
.
Expertise
His work, broadly situated within the area of
consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
research, has focused on the nature of the processes underlying incidental (or implicit, or unconscious) learning. Specifically, he focuses on the distinction and/or similarities between how learning with and without consciousness takes place in the brain. His main assumption is that consciousness is a graded phenomenon, and that differences between conscious and unconscious information processing result from graded differences in the quality of the underlying neural representations (e.g., strength, stability, distinctiveness), differences which themselves accrue as a result of learning. Thus, while learning may occur without consciousness, consciousness without learning is not possible.
Scientific societies and editorial assignments
From 1999 to 2009 and since 2011, Cleeremans has been member of the board of the
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) is a non-profit organization for professional membership that aims to encourage research on consciousness in cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and other relevant discip ...
, and its president since 2020. In 2000, he organized the association's fourth annual meeting held at the
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. He acted as editor of a book based on the meeting (''The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation'',
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
, 2003). He is past-president of th
Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences and for several years was editor of its journal
Psychologica Belgica Cleeremans is also past-president of th
European Society for Cognitive Psychology and acted as associate editor for
Consciousness and Cognition
The journal ''Consciousness and Cognition'' provides a forum for scientific approaches to the issues of consciousness, voluntary control, and self. The journal was launched by Bernard Baars and William Banks.
The journal's editor-in-chief positio ...
(2009-2017). In the same year he was elected Member of
The Royal Academy of Belgium. Also, June 2009 saw the publication of ''The Oxford Companion to Consciousness'' (
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
), an extensive overview of the field of consciousness research, edited by Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans, and
Patrick Wilken. Today, he is secretary-general for the National Committee of Psychological Science (Belgium). He is field editor-in-chief of the journa
Frontiers in Psychology a function in which he oversees about 1200 editors.
Honours and awards
*2009: Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium
*2011: Laureate of the CHAOS award
*2014: Grand Officer in the
Order of the Crown.
*2014: Holder of the
Francqui Foundation
The Francqui Foundation was founded in 1932 by Emile Francqui and Herbert Hoover with the goal "to further the development of higher education and scientific research in Belgium". The foundation is a private foundation under the legal form of a ...
Chair at the
Université de Liège (ULiège)
*2015: Laureate of the Belgian
National Fund for Scientific Research
The National Fund for Scientific Research (NFSR) (Dutch: ''Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek'' (NFWO), French: ''Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique'' (FNRS)) was once a government institution in Belgium for supporting scien ...
(F.R.S.-FNRS) 2010-2015 Quinquennal Prize "Ernest-John Solvay" for the Human Sciences
*2015-2020: Nominated Senior Fellow of the
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a Canadian-based global research organization that brings together teams of top researchers from around the world to address important and complex questions. It was founded in 1982 and is s ...
(CIFAR), Brain, Mind, and Consciousness Program
*2016: Co-laureate, with Emilie Caspar, Julia Christiensen and Patrick Haggard of the Evens Foundation Science Prize
Popularization of science
Axel Cleeremans appeared in the 2018 Netflix documentary
''The Most Unknown'' on scientific research directed by
Ian Cheney
Ian Cheney is an American documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and producer.
Early life and education
Cheney grew up in Massachusetts and Maine, attended The Mountain School, a semester school for high school juniors, and graduated from Milt ...
.
References
Bibliography
* Cleeremans, A., Kuvaldina, M., & Allakhverdov, V. (Eds) (2019). Implicit Learning: Fifty years on. Hove: Routledge.
*Bayne, T., Cleeremans, A., & Wilken, P. (Eds.) (2009). ''The Oxford Companion to Consciousness''.
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
.
* Cleeremans, A. (2005). Computational correlates of consciousness. ''Progress in Brain Research, 150'', 81–98.
* Atkinson, A., Thomas, M., & Cleeremans, A. (2000). Consciousness: Mapping the theoretical landscape, ''Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4'', 372–382.
* Maquet, P., Laureys, S., Peigneux, P., Fuchs, S., Petiau, C., Philips, C., Aerts, J., Del Fiore, G., Degueldre, C., Meulemans, T., Luxen, A., Franck, G., Van Der Linden, M., Smith, C., & Cleeremans, A. (2000). Experience-Dependent Changes in Cerebral Activation During
REM Sleep
Rapid eye movement sleep (REM sleep or REMS) is a unique phase of sleep in mammals and birds, characterized by random rapid movement of the eyes, accompanied by low muscle tone throughout the body, and the propensity of the sleeper to dream viv ...
, ''Nature Neuroscience, 3'', 381–386.
* Cleeremans, A., Destrebecqz, A., & Boyer, M. (1998). Implicit learning: News from the front. ''Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2'', 406–416.
* Cleeremans, A. (1993). ''Mechanisms of Implicit Learning: Connectionist Models of Sequence Processing''. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962.
History
The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...
.
External links
Axel Cleeremans' personal webpage(with downloadable papers)
Axel Cleeremans' page at the Royal AcademyCO3 - Consciousness, Cognition & Computation Group- formerl
CSRU - Cognitive Science Research UnitUniversité Libre de Bruxelles
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cleeremans, Axel
1962 births
Living people
Belgian psychologists
Belgian consciousness researchers and theorists
Members of the Royal Academy of Belgium