Mel Goodale FRSC, FRS
FRS, Distinguished University Professor, Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience and Director of the Brain and Mind Institute
University of Western Ontario, Canada
Profile – Melvyn Goodale (b. 1943)
Having emigrated with his parents from England to Canada as a child, Mel Goodale studied psychology before setting off to ‘find himself’ travelling around the UK. Getting sick of casual jobs and damp apartments and with still no idea what he wanted to do, he headed for graduate school in Calgary, ended up in a lab studying visual neuroscience, and was instantly captivated. He is now a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Western Ontario and a Fellow of the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is best known for his work with David Milner on the functional organisation of the visual pathways in the cerebral cortex. Their studies of visuomotor control in neurological patients led to their characterising the two streams of the primate visual system as ‘vision for perception’ and ‘vision for action’. He has since also begun to explore how the blind use echo location to navigate.
More biographical information
Academic web page
Wikipedia
Twitter: @action_brain
Q&A with Current Biology
Publications
Citations on Google Scholar
Selected publications relevant to consciousness
Goodale, M. A. (2007). Duplex vision: Separate cortical pathways for conscious perception and the control of action. In M. Velmans and S. Schneider (Eds), The Blackwell companion to consciousness (pp. 616–627). Oxford: Blackwell. Google Books preview here.
Goodale, M. A. (2014). How (and why) the visual control of action differs from visual perception. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 281(1785), 20140337. Open-access full text here.
Goodale, M., & Milner, D. (2006). One brain-two visual systems. Psychologist, 19(11), 660–663. Full text here.
Goodale, M. A., and Milner, D. (2013). Sight unseen: An exploration of conscious and unconscious vision. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Books preview of 2nd edition (2013; including new postscript, ‘Dee’s life twenty-five years on’) here.
Goodale, M. A., Pelisson, D., and Prablanc, C. (1986). Large adjustments in visually guided reaching do not depend on vision of the hand or perception of target displacement. Nature, 320, 748–750. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Video
What contents of consciousness are . . . streams of processing? Lecture, Turin, July 2016
Visual routes to knowledge and action: (almost) 25 years of two visual systems. Jeeves Lecture, University of St Andrews, November 2015
Vision and the brain: Unseen complexities, Part 2. Lecture, University of Washington, April 2009