The British Academy in partnership with Wiley-Blackwell, the STM and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc, have named American developmental psychologist, Dr. Michael Tomasello, as this year's recipient of the Wiley Prize in Psychology.
The £5,000 prize for 'lifetime achievement by an outstanding international scholar' is in recognition of Tomasello's work identifying the unique cognitive and cultural processes that distinguish humans from their nearest primate relatives, the great apes. Prof. Tomasello also works on child language and is a strong critic of generative grammar theory, expounded by British Academy Fellow Noam Chomsky, subscribing instead to the theory of cognitive linguistics.
Tomasello was a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, through the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, he has performed research on the social cognition of great apes at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig, Germany.
To access our daily STM news feed through your iPhone, iPad, or other smartphones, please visit www.myscoope.com for a mobile friendly reading experience.
