Risto Kalervo Näätänen (born 14 June 1939 in

Helsinki Helsinki ( or ; ; sv, Helsingfors, ) is the Capital city, capital, primate city, primate, and List of cities and towns in Finland, most populous city of Finland. Located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, it is the seat of the region of U ...

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bot ...

) is a

psychological 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 bet ...

scientist, pioneer in the field of

cognitive neuroscience Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental process ...

, and known worldwide as one of the discoverers of the electrophysiological mismatch negativity. He has been a much-cited social scientist and one of the few individuals appointed permanent Academy Professor of the

Academy of Finland The Academy of Finland ( fi, Suomen Akatemia, sv, Finlands Akademi) is a governmental funding body for scientific research in Finland. It is based in Helsinki. Yearly, the Academy administers over 260 million euros to Finnish research activities ...

. He retired in 200

retaining a title of Academy Professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland. Since 2007, he has been a professor at the

University of Tartu The University of Tartu (UT; et, Tartu Ülikool; la, Universitas Tartuensis) is a university in the city of Tartu in Estonia. It is the national university of Estonia. It is the only classical university in the country, and also its biggest ...

Biography

Education

He started to study psychology in the

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki ( fi, Helsingin yliopisto, sv, Helsingfors universitet, abbreviated UH) is a public research university located in Helsinki, Finland since 1829, but founded in the city of Turku (in Swedish ''Åbo'') in 1640 as the R ...

in 1958, training in cognitive electrophysiology at the laboratory of Donald B. Lindsley at the University of California, Los Angeles (1965-1966). Under Lindsley's supervision, he defended his doctoral dissertation about brain mechanisms of selective attention at the University of Helsinki in 1967. As early as that he started to influence the scientific world: in his thesis he refuted a then well-known experimental design and no works have ever been published using that design again.

Career

In 1975, at an age of 36, having published 13 academic articles, he was appointed as a Professor of General Psychology at the University of Helsinki. In practice, he was at that department until 1999, but officially on leave from 1983, being salaried as an Academy Professor of The Academy of Finland. He is founder of the Cognitive Brain Research Unit (CBRU) at the

- a unit of which he was director from 1991–2006. Näätänen retired in 2007, a retirement symposium was held in his honor in 2008. Since 2008, he has been a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the

Estonia Estonia, formally the Republic of Estonia, is a country by the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, an ...

, Visiting Professor at the Centre of Functionally Integrative Neurosciences (CFIN) of the

University of Århus Aarhus University ( da, Aarhus Universitet, abbreviated AU) is a public research university with its main campus located in Aarhus, Denmark. It is the second largest and second oldest university in Denmark. The university is part of the Coimbra Gr ...

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of Denmark , establish ...

, retaining a tertiary affiliation at the

as of May 2014, having held the title of an Academy Professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland since retirement. He has sat on editorial boards and reviewed for specialist journals (e.g.,

Brain Research ''Brain Research'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal focusing on several aspects of neuroscience. It publishes research reports and " minireviews". The editor-in-chief is Matthew J. LaVoie (University of Florida). Until 2011, full reviews were ...

, International Journal of Psychophysiology,

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience The ''Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering cognitive neuroscience. It aims for a cross-discipline approach, covering research in neuroscience, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, neurobiolo ...

NeuroReport ''NeuroReport'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the field of neuroscience. It was established in 1990 and is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. The editors-in-chief are Michael Jakowec and Patric Stanton. According to the ...

). He has published articles from collaborations with thousands of researchers. As of June 2014, according to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...

no collaborators are listed as co-authors and citations totalled 62182 (17578 since 2013) resulting in an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as ...

of 128 (64 since 2009), being amongst the 0.5% most-cited scientists still alive, the most-cited scientist in Finnish and Estonian history. Noteworthy is that

Teuvo Kohonen Teuvo Kalevi Kohonen (11 July 1934 – 13 December 2021) was a prominent Finnish academic ( Dr. Eng.) and researcher. He was professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland.mismatch negativity (MMN) first revealed in collaboration with Anthony W.K. Gaillard, and Sirkka Mäntysalo in reinterpretion of the prior findings of an early selective attention effect - discovered by Steven Hillyard - as a consequence of experiments that were carried out in the Institute for Perception TNO,

Soesterberg Soesterberg is a town in the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is a part of the municipality of Soest, and lies about 5 km northeast of Zeist, on the road between Amersfoort and Utrecht. It was the location of Soesterberg Air Base History ...

Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...

, in the summer of 1975, by Sirkka Mäntysalo. MMN has been established as a scalp-negative component of the

event-related potential An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event. More formally, it is any stereotyped electrophysiological response to a stimulus. The study of the bra ...

or ERPs, as derived from recordings made electroencephalographically via electrodes attached to the scalp. MMN was shown to be elicited by deviant stimuli interspersed amongst a series of standards. MMN has influenced theories of language perception, together with studies of cognitive development and musical intelligence. Risto Näätänen has been most interested in the clinical scope: abnormalities of MMN have been associated with

alcoholism Alcoholism is, broadly, any drinking of alcohol that results in significant mental or physical health problems. Because there is disagreement on the definition of the word ''alcoholism'', it is not a recognized diagnostic entity. Predomi ...

psychosis Psychosis is a condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavi ...

schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social w ...

Alzheimer's disease Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens. It is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As ...

Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms usually emerge slowly, and as the disease worsens, non-motor symptoms beco ...

, and

dyslexia Dyslexia, also known until the 1960s as word blindness, is a disorder characterized by reading below the expected level for one's age. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, r ...

. Facets of MMN have been associated with the prediction of waking in

coma A coma is a deep state of prolonged unconsciousness in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light, or sound, lacks a normal wake-sleep cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. Coma patients exhi ...

tose individuals - as has been hailed as
breakthrough
- yet MMN has remained a research tool and has not met criteria to determine clinical decisions about the continuation of life support. Risto Näätänen's major societal impact was to influence Finnish traffic politics, his studies of traffic behavior - conducted during the presidency of

Kekkonen Urho Kaleva Kekkonen (; 3 September 1900 – 31 August 1986), often referred to by his initials UKK, was a Finnish politician who served as the eighth and longest-serving president of Finland from 1956 to 1982. He also served as prime minister ...

- leading to the establishment of speed limits on Finnish roads. Reaching the age of 74 in 2013, he expressed hopes that MMN would be implemented in education.Juhan Javoiš – Universaalne aju uurimise tööriist. Journal Eesti loodus, March 2013.

Books

* Road-User Behaviour and Traffic Accidents (1976) * Attention and Brain Function (1992) * Mismatch Negativity: A Probe to Auditory Perception and Cognition in Basic and Clinical Research (chapter in the Cognitive Electrophysiology of Mind and Brain, 2003)

Most influential articles

* The N1 wave of the human electric and magnetic response to sound - a review and an analysis of the component structure (1987, ''Psychophysiology, 24''(4), 375-425) * Early selective-attention effect on evoked potential reinterpreted. (1978, ''Acta Psychologica, 42''(4), 313-29) * The role of attention in auditory information-processing as revealed by event-related potentials and other brain measures of cognitive function (1990, ''Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13''(2), 201-232) * Language-specific phoneme representations revealed by electric and magnetic brain responses (1997, ''Nature, 385''(6615), 432-434)

Awards and recognition

* The Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Dundee University, Scotland (1979) * The Purkinje Prize, Praha, Czechoslovakia (1988) * Knight, First Class, of the Order of the White Rose of Finland (1990) * The Main Prize of the Finnish Cultural Foundation (1990) * The Traffic-Safety Prize of the Finnish Traffic-Safety Organization (1992) * The Distinguished Contributions Award of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR), Washington D.C., USA (1995) * George Soros Professor of Psychology, University of Tartu, Estonia (1996) * The First National Science Award of Finland, Ministry of Education, Finland (1997) * Honorary Doctor of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä (2000) * Honorary Doctor of Social Sciences, University of Tartu, Estonia (2000) * The 20th Anniversary of IOP Award for Highly Exceptional and Prize-Worthy Contributions to Psychophysiology and Related Neurosciences (International Organization of Psychophysiology, Montreal, Canada, 2002) * Fellow of the World Innovation Foundation, U.K. (2005) * The Honoured Fellow, The Russian Society for BioPsychiatry (RSBP) and The Russian Neuroscience Society (RNS), Russia (2005) * The Senior Prize of the Finnish Psychological Societies and Associations, Tampere, Finland (2006) * Honorary Doctor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain (2007) * Nordic Prize for research within Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Sweden (2007) * Honorary Doctor of neurosciences, University of St. Petersburg (2008) * Honorary Doctor, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland (2010) * The Grand Medal of the University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia (2010) * Association for Psychological Science, Fellow, Washington, DC, USA (2011) * The Main Scientific Prize of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Finland (2011) * Commander of the Order of the Lion of Finland (2012) * The Golden Medal of the Finnish Psychological Association, Finland (2012)

References

External links

Risto Näätänen's personal webpage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Naatanen, Risto 1939 births Living people Scientists from Helsinki Finnish psychologists Finnish neuroscientists Academic personnel of the University of Helsinki Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Foreign Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences