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Oliver Vitouch (born April 4, 1971 in Vienna) is an Austrian psychologist and cognitive scientist. He has served as Rector of the University of Klagenfurt since 2012, and as Vice-President and President, respectively, of Universities Austria since 2016.
Academic biography
Vitouch attended high school at the Akademisches Gymnasium Vienna from 1981 to 1989, and studied music at the Vienna Conservatory from 1986 to 1992. At the University of Vienna, he studied psychology (with a focus on human biology and cognitive neuroscience), receiving a master of science degree in 1995 and a doctor of science in 1999. He was a pre-doctoral assistant at the University of Vienna from 1995, and a research scientist at Gerd Gigerenzer's Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin from 2000 to 2002, and has been teaching at the Free University of Berlin and the University of St. Gallen. After his habilitation in psychology, he became associate professor at the University of Vienna in 2002 and was appointed full professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Klagenfurt in 2003.
Presidencies
From 2005 to 2006, Vitouch was head of the Department of Psychology, and from 2006 to 2012, Chairman of the University's Senate (re-elected thrice). He served as Member of the Board (2004–2006) and President (2008–2010) of the Austrian Psychological Association. In this capacity, he contributed significantly to the implementation of university admission laws (Art. 124b, now Art. 71c, of the Austrian Universities Act) in consequence of the 2005 judgement of the European Court of Justice decreeing open access to Austrian universities also for German students.
Oliver Vitouch took office as Rector of the University of Klagenfurt in October 2012. He has been re-elected for a second four-year term (2016–2020) in May 2015, and for a third term (2020–2024) in May 2019.
From January 2015 to May 2016, he was in charge as President of the Alps-Adriatic Rectors’ Conference (AARC), a society founded 1979 in Graz with currently 48 member universities from Austria, Southern Germany, Hungary, Upper Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Albania. His successor in this role was Dragan Marušič. Since January 2016, he served as Vice-President and from June 2016 to December 2017 as President (after Sonja Hammerschmid's change into federal government) of Universities Austria, the association of Austria's 22 federal research universities. He was chiefly involved into the enactment of Austria’s new system of university funding (Art. 141 to 141c and 71a to 71d of the Austrian Universities Act). Not running for another term as President, he is active as Vice-President again since January 2018, and has served as Acting President in the second half of 2019.
On June 9, 2016, a group of identitarians invaded a lecture on inclusion at the University of Klagenfurt. Aiming to keep hold of the squad leader until the police arrives, Vitouch was punched in the stomach. The offender was convicted of aggravated assault on July 12, 2019 by the criminal court in Graz.
As Vice-President of Universities Austria, Vitouch was significantly involved into the emergence of the initiative Universities for Enlightenment (U4E), sustained by the Rectors' Conferences of Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland, Serbia, Switzerland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. This was triggered by the expulsion of the Central European University by the Hungarian government, the governmental reorganization of Hungarian Universities, and the government/university conflicts in Poland and the Czech Republic. The ten Rectors' Conferences signed the "Vienna Statement" in December 2018.
Media activities
From November 2017 to January 2020, Vitouch wrote for the column Außensicht (German for "outer view") of Kleine Zeitung, Austria's largest regional daily. Earlier, he had sporadically contributed to the op-ed page (Kommentar der anderen) of Der Standard since 1996. His main topics were higher education, science, and Enlightenment.
Selected bibliography
- Vitouch, O., & Glück, J. (1997). "Small group PETting:" Sample sizes in brain mapping research. Human Brain Mapping, 5, 74–77.
- (2001). When your ear sets the stage: Musical context effects in film perception. Psychology of Music, 29, 70–83.
- Neumeister, A., Konstantinidis, A., Stastny, J., Schwarz, M. J., Vitouch, O., Willeit, M., Praschak-Rieder, N., Zach, J., de Zwaan, M., Bondy, B., Ackenheil, M., & Kasper, S. (2002). Association between serotonin transporter gene promoter polymorphism (5HTTLPR) and behavioral responses to tryptophan depletion in healthy women with and without family history of depression. Archives of General Psychiatry, 59, 613–620.
- (2003). Absolutist models of absolute pitch are absolutely misleading. Music Perception, 21, 111–117.
- Gigerenzer, G., Krauss, S., & Vitouch, O. (2004). The null ritual: What you always wanted to know about significance testing but were afraid to ask. In D. Kaplan (Ed.), The SAGE handbook of quantitative methodology for the social sciences (pp. 391–408). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
- Hanoch, Y., & Vitouch, O. (2004). When less is more: Information, emotional arousal and the ecological reframing of the Yerkes-Dodson law. Theory & Psychology, 14, 427–452.
- (2006). The musical mind: Neural tuning and the aesthetic experience. In P. B. Baltes, P. Reuter-Lorenz & F. Rösler (Eds.), Lifespan development and the brain: The perspective of biocultural co-constructivism (pp. 217–236). New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Vitouch, O., & Ladinig, O. (Eds.) (2009). Music and evolution. Musicae Scientiae, 13 (Special Issue 2009–2010, 445 pp.).
- Marewski, J., Pohl, R., & Vitouch, O. (Eds.) (2010/11). Recognition processes in inferential decision making (I–III). Special Issue, Judgment and Decision Making, 5 (4), 6 (1) & 6 (5).
- Marewski, J., Pohl, R., & Vitouch, O. (2011). Recognition-based judgments and decisions: What we have learned (so far). Judgment and Decision Making, 6, 359–380.
- Martignon, L., Vitouch, O., Takezawa, M., & Forster, M. R. (2011). Naive and yet enlightened: From natural frequencies to fast and frugal decision trees. In G. Gigerenzer, R. Hertwig & T. Pachur (Eds.), Heuristics: The foundations of adaptive behavior (pp. 136–150). New York: Oxford University Press.
- Koreimann, S., Gula, B., & Vitouch, O. (2014). Inattentional deafness in music. Psychological Research, 78, 304–312.
