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For distinguished contributions to psychophysiology: Marta Kutas

2009; Wiley; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1469-8986.2009.00930.x

1469-8986

Cyma Van Petten, Kara D. Federmeier, Phillip J. Holcomb,

Reading and Literacy Development

In a career spanning over more than three decades, Marta Kutas has been a pioneer and inspiration to cognitive psychophysiologists, so that the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) granted her our highest honor in 2007, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychophysiology. The study of human language processing now routinely incorporates measures of brain activity, but prior to Marta's pioneering experiments there had been virtually no work outside of the traditional domain of aphasia, so that it would not be an exaggeration to consider her the mother of brain and language research in the healthy population. Marta's life story is no less inspiring than her contributions to our science. She was born in Hungary, behind what was then known as the Iron Curtain. At the age of seven she and her family fled the country for Austria and then made their way to the United States, where they soon settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. Marta knew no English when she was placed in the Cincinnati school system but powered her way through this obstacle to become a stellar student. Those early struggles with a new language may have been prophetic for her coming career. After high school Marta won a scholarship to Oberlin College, where she eventually chose a psychology major over graphic arts. (Some former students believe that Marta's insistence that data figures be clear, accurate, and aesthetically pleasing can be traced to her roots in the visual arts.) From Oberlin, she went to the University of Illinois in Champaign, where her doctoral advisor Emanuel Donchin had recently set up one of the first cognitive event-related brain potential laboratories in the world. At Illinois she was a star among what became a formative group of young scholars in the emerging field of cognitive psychophysiology. As a graduate student, she had her first two publications in Science, describing some basic properties of the readiness potential (Kutas & Donchin, 1974), and establishing the latency of the P300 component as a measure of mental chronometry (Kutas, McCarthy, & Donchin, 1977). In Illinois, Kutas' interests first turned to questions about hemispheric specialization and the psychology of language, but this interest came to fruition after her 1977 Ph.D. and a move west for postdoctoral work in Steve Hillyard's laboratory in the Department of Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Marta immersed herself in a series of experiments focused on using ERPs as a new way to track language comprehension—after what was supposed to be a P3 experiment went awry. These experiments led to what is arguably one of the most important and widely cited ERP studies ever published: a 1980 Science paper reporting that semantic expectations could be observed in brain activity and that this could be accomplished noninvasively. There are now well over a thousand journal articles in print using the N400 to evaluate some aspect of cognitive processing. The early San Diego work rapidly attracted funding from the National Science Foundation in 1980 and also merited the Distinguished Scientist Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology from the American Psychological Association in 1984. Marta continued in the Neurosciences department under a variety of grant-funded job titles through 1990 and achieved wide renown for her costume-mandatory Halloween parties. She accepted her first regular academic position in 1988 as one of the founding professors in the newly formed Department of Cognitive Sciences at UCSD, where she currently serves as chair. She also serves as director of the interdisciplinary Center for Research in Language at UCSD. The university recognized her contributions to the department, university, and international research community by promotion to the rank of Distinguished Professor in 2008, and she became a Fellow of the American Psychological Society in 2009. Marta has continued to be a leader in what is now called cognitive neuroscience. Her current research interests span essentially all aspects of language processing and its relationship to memory, attention, and emotion, in young adults, older adults, dementia, schizophrenia, and across multiple languages. She has published over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and a large number of book chapters. In addition to her contributions to a better understanding of cognition, Marta has consistently promoted psychophysiology as a discipline and worked to refine our methods. She has also contributed to the Society as Associate Editor of Psychophysiology from 1986 to 1994, and as President of SPR in 1996. Throughout her career Marta has been an important role model, resource, and advocate for countless students, postdocs and colleagues. Her generosity with her time and her genuine interest in promoting the work of others is well known in the field, and her efforts have helped to launch and further the careers of scientists in several countries. One former graduate student notes that “Marta teaches not only her own students, but any student who asks. Even when she is under tremendous time pressure, she can often be found reading a paper or looking over stimuli for a student for whom she has no “official” responsibility of any kind. She has shaped the work and the lives of a sizable majority of the students who have come through the graduate program of UCSD's Department of Cognitive Science.” Marta's attitude about the importance of mentoring is clearly conveyed to her official trainees as well, in that nearly every graduate student or postdoc in her laboratory is expected to acquire some experience working with undergraduate students and to take undergraduate education seriously. People who have worked in Marta Kutas' laboratory and benefited from her expertise range from high school students to visiting professors and include Jamie Alexander, Ken Baldwin, Horatio Barber, Chris Barkley, Steve Barrera, Mireille Besson, Tim Beyer, Klinton Bicknell, Shir Boaz, Arielle Borovsky, Todd Braver, Chrissy Camblin, Wen-Hsuan Chan, Adam Chmielewski, Benjamin Cipollini, Seana Coulson, H. Wind Cowles, Lindsay Crissman, Anders Dale, Bruno DeBruille, Katherine DeLong, Esmerald De Ochoa, Kara Federmeier, Todd Ferretti, Giorgio Ganis, Elana Golumbic, Irina Gorodnitsky, Katja Goydke, David Groppe, Thomas Gunter, Don Hagler, Frank Haist, Lea Hald, Steven Harris, Tony Harris, Arturo Hernandez, Philip Hofmeister, Shulan Hsieh, Bernadette Jansma, Paul Johnston, Carrie Joyce, Katrin Keller, Laura Kemmer, Laura Kertz, Michael Kiang, Jonathan King, Robert Kluender, Pia Knoeferle, Adam Koerner, Etienne Korvorst, Nayoung Kwon, Marcus Lauer, Ming Lo, Tania Lombrozo, Yulei Ma, Heinke Mai, Vicente Malave, Heather McIsaac, Devon McLennan, Marjolein Meeuwissen, Ross Metusalem, David Lukas Molfese, Eva Moreno, Ben Motz, Horst Müller, Tom Münte, Alessia C. Neyndorff, John Olichney, Ken Paller, Michele Perry, Francesca Pesciarelli, Jocelyn Prugh, Tim Rohrer, Lisa Rosenfelt, Haline Schendan, Kolja Schiltz, Teresa Schuhmann, Tanya Schwartz, Jessica Segal, Ava Senkfor, Marisa Sizemore, Nathaniel Smith, Marie St. George, Jenny Staab, Andrew Stringfellow, Kim Sweeney, Diane Swick, Andras Szenkuti, Melanie Tumlin, Tom Urbach, Cyma Van Petten, Maria Pia Viggiano, Jill Weckerly, Sabine Weiss, Nathan White, Nicole Wicha, Sabine Windmann, Eddie Wlotko, Doug Yovanovich, and Jelena Yovanovich. We hope that there are many more to come.