Risto Kalervo Näätänen (14 June 1939 – 5 October 2023
[ ]) was a Finnish
psychological
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...
scientist, pioneer in the field of
cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the Biology, biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental ...
, and known worldwide as one of the discoverers of the electrophysiological
mismatch negativity
The mismatch negativity (MMN) or mismatch field (MMF) is a component of the event-related potential (ERP) to an odd stimulus in a sequence of stimuli. It arises from electrical activity in the brain and is studied within the field of cognitive neu ...
. He was a much-cited social scientist and one of the few individuals appointed permanent Academy Professor of the
Academy of Finland. He retired in 2007 and retained a title of Academy Professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland. He was a professor at the
University of Tartu
The University of Tartu (UT; ; ) is a public research university located in the city of Tartu, Estonia. It is the national university of Estonia. It is also the largest and oldest university in the country. starting in 2007.
Biography
Education
Näätänen started to study psychology in the
University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki (, ; UH) is a public university in Helsinki, Finland. The university was founded in Turku in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Åbo under the Swedish Empire, and moved to Helsinki in 1828 under the sponsorship of Alexander ...
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 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 was founder of the Cognitive Brain Research Unit (CBRU) at the
University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki (, ; UH) is a public university in Helsinki, Finland. The university was founded in Turku in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Åbo under the Swedish Empire, and moved to Helsinki in 1828 under the sponsorship of Alexander ...
– a unit of which he was director from 1991 to 2006.
Näätänen retired in 2007, and a retirement symposium was held in his honor in 2008. He was a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the
University of Tartu
The University of Tartu (UT; ; ) is a public research university located in the city of Tartu, Estonia. It is the national university of Estonia. It is also the largest and oldest university in the country. ,
Estonia
Estonia, officially the Republic of Estonia, is a country in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland across from Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea across from Sweden, to the south by Latvia, and to the east by Ru ...
, Visiting Professor at the Centre of Functionally Integrative Neurosciences (CFIN) of the
University of Århus,
Denmark
Denmark is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe. It is the metropole and most populous constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark,, . also known as the Danish Realm, a constitutionally unitary state that includes the Autonomous a ...
, retaining a tertiary affiliation at the
University of Helsinki
The University of Helsinki (, ; UH) is a public university in Helsinki, Finland. The university was founded in Turku in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Åbo under the Swedish Empire, and moved to Helsinki in 1828 under the sponsorship of Alexander ...
as of May 2014, and held the title of an Academy Professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland after retirement.
Näätänen 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, neurobiology, ...
,
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 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 Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...
no collaborators were 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 success indicators such as winning t ...
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 was that
Teuvo Kohonen also vied for the title of most-cited Finnish scientist.
Death
Risto Näätänen died from
COVID-19
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In January 2020, the disease spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The symptoms of COVID‑19 can vary but often include fever ...
,
in October 2023, at the age of 84.
Legacy
His life work revolved around the
mismatch negativity
The mismatch negativity (MMN) or mismatch field (MMF) is a component of the event-related potential (ERP) to an odd stimulus in a sequence of stimuli. It arises from electrical activity in the brain and is studied within the field of cognitive neu ...
(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
T ...
,
Netherlands
, Terminology of the Low Countries, informally Holland, is a country in Northwestern Europe, with Caribbean Netherlands, overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of the four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Nether ...
, in the summer of 1975, by Sirkka Mäntysalo. MMN was 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 sense, sensory, cognition, cognitive, or motor system, motor event. More formally, it is any stereotyped electrophysiology, electrophysiologi ...
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 influenced theories of language perception, together with studies of cognitive development and
musical intelligence. Risto Näätänen was most interested in the clinical scope: abnormalities of MMN have been associated with
alcoholism
Alcoholism is the continued drinking of alcohol despite it causing problems. Some definitions require evidence of dependence and withdrawal. Problematic use of alcohol has been mentioned in the earliest historical records. The World He ...
,
psychosis
In psychopathology, psychosis is a condition in which a person is unable to distinguish, in their experience of life, between what is and is not real. Examples of psychotic symptoms are delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized or inco ...
in
schizophrenia
Schizophrenia () is a mental disorder characterized variously by hallucinations (typically, Auditory hallucination#Schizophrenia, hearing voices), delusions, thought disorder, disorganized thinking and behavior, and Reduced affect display, f ...
,
Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease and the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As the disease advances, symptoms can include problems wit ...
,
Parkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a neurodegenerative disease primarily of the central nervous system, affecting both motor system, motor and non-motor systems. Symptoms typically develop gradually and non-motor issues become ...
, and
dyslexia
Dyslexia (), previously known as word blindness, is a learning disability that affects either reading or writing. Different people are affected to different degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, wri ...
. Facets of MMN 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 Nociception, respond normally to Pain, painful stimuli, light, or sound, lacks a normal Circadian rhythm, sleep-wake cycle and does not initiate ...
tose individuals – as was hailed as a 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.]
Publications
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)
* The Mismatch Negativity: A Window to the Brain (2019)
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
2023 deaths
Scientists from Helsinki
Finnish psychologists
Finnish neuroscientists
University of Helsinki alumni
Academic staff of the University of Helsinki
Academic staff of the University of Tartu
Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Finnish expatriates in Estonia