Faculty Profile

Profile

Mel Goodale is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at Western University. His early work, in which he demonstrated that the visual control of action is functionally independent of conscious visual perception, laid the foundation for the Goodale-Milner ‘duplex’ account of high-level vision. This account provides a convincing resolution to conflicting accounts of visual function that have characterized much of the work in the field for the last one hundred years. Over the last two decades, he has carried out neuroimaging and psychophysical research that has refined and extended the two-visual-systems proposal. These ideas have had an enormous influence in the life sciences and medicine, and the two-visual-systems proposal is now part of almost every textbook in vision, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology.

In 1999, Goodale was awarded the Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award (CSBBCS). In 2007, he was awarded the Hellmuth Prize for Scientific Achievement (Western) and, in 2008, the Richard C. Tees Award for Distinguished Leadership (CSBBCS).  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Society of London (UK).  In 2016, he was appointed as an Ivey Fellow by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.