Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Emanuel Donchin (1935–2018)

2018; Wiley; Volume: 55; Issue: 12 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/psyp.13302

1469-8986

Monica Fabiani, Marta Kutas, Gregory A. Miller, Michael Coles,

Heart Rate Variability and Autonomic Control

Emanuel (Manny) Donchin passed away on October 10, 2018, in Tampa, Florida. He is survived by Rina Donchin, his wife of 63 years, his children Ayala and Opher, five grandchildren, and a large scientific family. Manny was a pioneer—a giant in the field of ERPs (compared to evoked potentials, the term ERPs acknowledges the fact that internal or expected but missing stimuli also elicit brain responses). Manny had an immeasurable impact on psychophysiology and experimental psychology, especially through his promotion of ERPs as a central tool in cognitive electrophysiology. Manny similarly played a major and significant role in the development and assessment of recording and analytic procedures for ERP research (e.g., Fabiani, Gratton, Karis, & Donchin, 1987; Gratton, Coles, & Donchin, 1983, 1989 ; Picton et al., 2000). In addition to decades of innovative and influential theoretical and empirical published works, Manny pioneered the use of multivariate analyses (e.g., Donchin, 1966, 1969 ; Donchin & Heffley, 1978) and powerful general-purpose laboratory computers (e.g., Donchin & Heffley, 1975) in psychophysiology. As much as his research, it was Manny's proactive and indefatigable national and international presence that was instrumental not only in creating but in shaping the field of cognitive psychophysiology/cognitive neuroscience (e.g., Donchin, Ritter, & McCallum, 1978) into the vibrant and flourishing field it is today. This can be attributed to the demonstration that electrophysiological signals from the scalp allow scientists to investigate covert cognitive processes that may be difficult to infer from behavioral measures alone. Manny's views had an enormous impact on the recognition of cognitive psychophysiology as a research field in its own right, well before the label “cognitive neuroscience” came into common use. Manny was born and grew up in Tel Aviv (in what is now Israel). Manny and Rina joined a kibbutz in 1952, where they served in the Israeli Defense Forces and married in 1955. In 1957, Manny entered Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he completed his bachelor degree with a double major in psychology and statistics. In 1961, he left Israel on a Fulbright Scholarship to attend graduate school at UCLA under the supervision of Donald Lindsley, who was studying electrophysiology primarily in cats but was just starting some studies with humans. It was in Lindsley's lab that Manny started recording and averaging EEG traces (often by hand) to extract the brain's responses to stimuli, and where his first two papers as a graduate student were published in Science (Donchin, Wicke, & Lindsley, 1963; Wicke, Donchin, & Lindsley, 1964). After finishing his PhD in a record 2.5 years, Manny did a stint as a postdoctoral fellow with Frank and Leyla Morrell at Stanford, where he started fruitful collaborations with Leon Cohen and Arnie Starr (Donchin & Cohen, 1967; Smith, Donchin, Cohen, & Starr, 1970). He was then hired at NASA–Ames labs, where he conducted electrophysiological research with humans and nonhuman primates (Donchin, Otto, Gerbrandt, & Pribram, 1971). In 1968, Manny joined the psychology faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he established the Cognitive Psychophysiology Lab (CPL). The CPL, which often welcomed national and international visiting scholars, quickly became one of the leading world centers for the study of ERPs, especially their cognitive applications. For decades, the CPL meetings were the forum for highly animated discussions about data—newly acquired as well as published. These weekly lab meetings brought together several faculty members (including Michael Coles, Christopher Wickens, Gregory A. Miller, Michael Gabriel, Susan Garnsey, and Arthur Kramer) and their students, in addition to Manny and his lab, creating a large and vibrant intellectual community. In 1981, shortly after becoming Psychology Department Head at Illinois, Manny persuaded his colleague Mike Coles to codirect the lab with him, further expanding the scope of research done at the CPL. Their remarkably productive partnership lasted until Manny retired from Illinois in 2001 to become the Chair of the Psychology Department at the University of South Florida. The CPL was the research home (and sometimes the actual home—working hours were quite long) of a large number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom went on to academic careers or research careers in industry. In the 1970s, this list included Marta Kutas (UCSD), Greg McCarthy (Yale), John Polich (Scripps), Nancy Squires (Stony Brook), Connie Duncan (Uniformed Services University), Ray “Skip” Johnson (Brooklyn College of the City University of New York), Jack Isreal, Greg Chesney, and Art Kramer (University of Illinois, now at Northeastern). From 1981 to 2001, this list also included many students, most of whom were jointly supervised by Manny and Mike: Gabriele Gratton (University of Illinois), Monica Fabiani (University of Illinois), William Gehring (University of Michigan), David Strayer (University of Utah), Kevin Spencer (Harvard Medical School), Ritske De Jong (University of Groningen), Clay Holroyd (University of Victoria), Leun Otten (University College London), Erik Sirevaag (Washington University), Demetrios Karis (Verizon), and Amir Mane (Bell Labs). These former mentees in turn have mentored dozens more currently active scholars, thereby expanding Manny's intellectual reach. As a scientist, Manny was routinely and quickly able to pinpoint the critical results of a study, as well as crucial issues or flaws in experimental design, analysis, and/or interpretation. At job talks, no matter the area of psychology, Manny invariably asked piercing questions about the fundamental meaning and contribution of the work presented. He very much enjoyed and encouraged debate within the lab as well as in the field of psychophysiology at large. As an advisor, he was fair but “a tad demanding”—he simply expected excellence. CPL members kept a “Quotes file” (or “democracy wall”) where out-of-context sentences spoken by lab members were recorded for posterity. The following sentence attributed to one of us (M. Fabiani) states: “Even if you give him the Bible he will say it's a rough draft.” Other quotes attributed to Manny (“No points for efforts, just results” and “I want it yesterday”) aptly describe the quality and pace expected of CPLers as they also highlight Manny's wry sense of humor (he read these quotes daily, contributed many, and laughed at those targeting him). Manny published an astonishing 13 papers that arguably can be considered “classics,” having been cited more than 1,000 times, and a longer list cited more than 400 times. Citations, of course, offer but one reflection of the impact that these articles have had on the field. His work on the P300 component of the ERP showed for the first time the dependence of its amplitude on subjective stimulus probability (Duncan-Johnson & Donchin, 1977; Squires, Wickens, Squires, & Donchin, 1976). His lab demonstrated that P300s could precede overt responses, indexing stimulus evaluation processes, albeit peaking at longer latencies as a function of task difficulty (Kutas, McCarthy, & Donchin, 1977; McCarthy & Donchin, 1981). In collaboration with Chris Wickens, Art Kramer, and Erik Sirevaag, Manny showed that the amplitude of P300 could be used to measure the allocation of attentional resources across concurrent tasks (Sirevaag, Kramer, Coles, & Donchin, 1989; Wickens, Kramer, Vanasse, & Donchin, 1983). Work published in the 1980s with Monica Fabiani and Demetrios Karis showed that P300-like activities recorded during stimulus encoding predict the subsequent memory of these stimuli (Fabiani & Donchin, 1995; Fabiani, Karis, & Donchin, 1986; Karis, Fabiani, & Donchin, 1984). These data contributed to theories of P300 function as a manifestation of context updating in working memory (Donchin, 1981; Donchin & Coles, 1988). These findings have also been applied to the use of ERPs in pioneering the detection of concealed information (e.g., Farwell & Donchin, 1991), which led to research on how to enable communication with individuals with locked-in syndrome (e.g., Donchin, Spencer, & Wijesinghe, 2000; Wolpaw et al., 2000). Collaborative work with Michael Coles, Gabriele Gratton, and Bill Gehring led to the derivation and/or characterization of other ERP components, including the lateralized readiness potential (Gratton, Coles, Sirevaag, Eriksen, & Donchin, 1988) and the error-related negativity (Gehring, Goss, Coles, Meyer, & Donchin, 1993). This brief description cannot do justice to the impact of the work from Manny's lab, which opened up many new lines of research. In recognition of his many contributions, Manny was elected president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) in 1980 (Donchin, 1981) and received SPR's highest honor—the Distinguished Career Contribution Award—in 1994 (Coles, 1995). As already mentioned, Manny was Head of the Psychology Department at the University of Illinois between 1980 and 1994, hiring many faculty members, some of whom are still there today, and propelling the department to be one of the highest ranking psychology departments in the United States. Manny became Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois in 2001 and moved to the University of South Florida, where he was Department Chair until 2008. There he maintained an active research program until his passing, focusing on the application of ERPs to communication in individuals with locked-in syndrome, leading to another long series of highly cited and influential publications (e.g., Sellers & Donchin, 2006; Sellers, Kubler, & Donchin, 2006). Emanuel Donchin will be sorely missed by the cognitive psychophysiology community, for whom he was an anchor and visionary leader. Fortunately for us, his legacy will live on through his broad and deep influence on the field as well as the many young scientists he mentored, who by now include not only his academic children but his academic grandchildren and great-grandchildren.