Mark Henry Johnson (born 1960) . . is a British cognitive neuroscientist who, since October 2017, has been Professor of

Experimental Psychology Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, in ...

and Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the

Association for Psychological Science The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in ...

Education

Johnson was educated at the University of Edinburgh (BSc) and the University of Cambridge where his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

was supervised by Patrick Bateson. He was a postgraduate student at King's College, Cambridge.

Career and research

In 1996, Johnson co-authored, (with

Jeffrey Elman Jeffrey Locke Elman (January 22, 1948 – June 28, 2018) was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He specialized in the field of neural networks. In 1990, he introduce ...

Annette Karmiloff-Smith Annette Karmiloff-Smith CBE FBA FMedSci (1938–2016) was a professorial research fellow at the Developmental Neurocognition Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. Before moving to Birbeck, she was Head of the Neurocognitive Development Unit a ...

Elizabeth Bates Elizabeth Ann Bates (July 26, 1947 – December 13, 2003) was a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. She was an internationally renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition, psyc ...

, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett), the book ''

Rethinking Innateness ''Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on development'' is a book regarding gene/environment interaction by Jeffrey Elman, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett published in 199 ...

'', which examines

neural network A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

approaches to development. In the book, Elman et al. propose that genetic information might provide "constraints" on how a dynamic network responds to the environment during learning. For example, they suggest that a learning system can be seen as being subject to architectural constraints during development, an idea that gave birth to the neural network field of constructivist modelling. Rethinking Innateness has received more than 1,500 citations, and was nominated as one of the "One hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th Century" (Minnesota Millennium Project). Johnson has gone on to develop an Interactive Specialization approach to development, that views cognitive brain development as a series of back-propagated interactions between genetics, brain, body and environment. This model of cognitive development emphasises that development is a

stochastic Stochastic (, ) refers to the property of being well described by a random probability distribution. Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselv ...

, network-based,

interactive Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but mo ...

process. As such, it echoes contemporary work in other areas of development, such as probabilistic epigenesis and gene regulatory networks. In 2007, Johnson co-authored (with Denis Mareschal, Sylvain Sirois, Michael Spratling, Michael Thomas and Gert Westermann) ''Neuroconstructivism'', which discusses the relationship between cognition, the brain and the environment. Specifically, they argue that "the brain acquires and develops multiple, fragmentary representations that are just sufficient for on-the-fly processing" and that these representations "serve to cause behaviours rather than to mirror the environment." Volume 2 contains a variety of neural network models that investigate how these representations change during learning (including models from Randy O’Reilly, Matthew Schlesinger and Yuko Munakata). Johnson specialises in the development of the brain networks subserving social cognition. He is the author of more than 200 papers, and has written or edited seven books, most notably his textbook ''Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience'' He serves, with Denis Mareschal, as co-editor of the journal ''Developmental Science''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, Mark H. 1960 births Living people Developmental psychologists British cognitive neuroscientists Carnegie Mellon University faculty Academics of Birkbeck, University of London Fellows of the British Academy Fellows of the Association for Psychological Science