Axel Cleeremans

Axel Cleeremans (born 5 March 1962) is a Research Director with the National Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium) and a professor of cognitive science with the Department of Psychology of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels.

Born in Brussels, Belgium, Cleeremans obtained an undergraduate degree in Psychology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, he went on to obtain an MS degree in Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA). At Carnegie Mellon, he subsequently completed his PhD under the supervision of James McClelland in 1991, on modelling of implicit sequence learning by means of artificial neural networks. Thereafter he returned to the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he worked as a Senior Research Assistant for two years, before becoming head of the Cognitive Science Research Unit in 1993, as a Research Associate funded by the National Fund for Scientific Research (currently as Research Director). In 2001-2002 he spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

His work, broadly situated within the area of consciousness research, has focused on the nature of the processes underlying incidental (or implicit, or unconscious) learning. Specifically, he focuses on the distinction and/or similarities between how learning with and without consciousness takes place in the brain. His main assumption is that consciousness is a graded phenomenon, and that differences between conscious and unconscious information processing result from graded differences in the quality of the underlying neural representations (e.g., strength, stability, distinctiveness), differences which themselves accrue as a result of learning. Thus, while learning may occur without consciousness, consciousness without learning is not possible.

Cleeremans is a member of the board of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and was the main organizer of its fourth annual meeting that was held at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, in June 2000. He acted as editor of a book based on the meeting ("The Unity Of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation", Oxford University Press, 2003). Since 2005 he is president-elect of the Belgian Association for Psychological Science, after having been editor of its journal, Psychologica Belgica for several years.

His most enigmatic motto is "No matter where you go, there you are" (Buckaroo Banzai)

Selected publications

* Cleeremans, A. (2005). Computational correlates of consciousness. "Progress in Brain Research, 150", 81-98.
* Maquet, P., Laureys, S., Peigneux, P., Fuchs, S., Petiau, C., Philips, C., Aerts, J., Del Fiore, G., Degueldre, C., Meulemans, T., Luxen, A., Franck, G., Van Der Linden, M., Smith, C., & Cleeremans, A. (2000). Experience-Dependent Changes in Cerebral Activation During REM Sleep, "Nature Neuroscience, 3", 381-386.
* Atkinson, A., Thomas, M., & Cleeremans, A. (2000). Consciousness: Mapping the theoretical landscape, "Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4", 372-382.
* Cleeremans, A., Destrebecqz, A., & Boyer, M. (1998). Implicit learning: News from the front. "Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2", 406-416.
* Cleeremans, A. (1997). Principles for implicit learning. In D. Berry (Ed.), "How implicit is implicit learning?" , pp. 195-234. Oxford: OUP.
* Cleeremans, A. (1993). "Mechanisms of Implicit Learning: Connectionist Models of Sequence Processing". Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
* Cleeremans, A. & McClelland, J.L. (1991). Learning the structure of event sequences. "Journal of Experimental Psychology : General, 120", 235-253.
* Cleeremans, A., Servan-Schreiber, D., & McClelland, J.L. (1989). Finite State Automata and Simple Recurrent Networks. "Neural Computation, 1", 372-381.

External links

* [http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/axc.html Axel Cleeremans' personal webpage] (with downloadable papers)
* [http://srsc.ulb.ac.be Cognitive Science Research Unit (as of 2008 called CO3, which stands for Consciousness, Cognition, & Computation)]
* [http://www.ulb.ac.be Université Libre de Bruxelles]