Morris Moscovitch

Morris Moscovitch is Max and Gianna Glassman Chair in Neuropsychology and Aging and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. He is also a Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Moscovitch is a leading neuropsychologist, with over 150 research articles focusing mainly on the neural substrates of high-level cognitive processes such as memory, attention, and recognition of faces and objects. According to Scopus, he has an h-index of 40 and over 5700 citations (March 2011). He has formulated a neuropsychological model of memory with three components: the posterior neocortex, which mediates performance on tests of memory without awareness; the medial temporal lobes, which automatically store information that is consciously apprehended at encoding and obligatorily recovers information on tests of conscious recollection that are cue-driven; and the frontal lobes, which work with memories delivered to and by the medial temporal lobes and posteri or neocortex, and recovered from them by supporting strategic processes that are needed at encoding and retrieval. Moscovitch received a B.A. in psychology from McGill University in 1966, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and 1972, respectively. He was born in Bucharest, Romania, where he lived for the first few years of his life before moving to Israel between the ages of 4 and 7 and subsequently moving to Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Moscovitch became interested in memory research while attending McGill for his undergraduate degree, where Brenda Milner's case study of HM inspired him to seek a career in neuropsychology. He also took a seminar taught by Donald O. Hebb, then the leading biological psychology theorist.