Nelson Cowan
Nelson Cowan (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, 1980) is Curators鈥� Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri.
Since his graduate school years, he has published many studies and several books about working memory, selective attention, and their childhood and life-span development, based on research largely funded by the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development. His collaborative work has extended the concepts to an improved understanding of neuropsychological conditions including language disorders, dyslexia, autism, schizophrenia, amnesia, Parkinson鈥檚 Disease, and alcoholic intoxication. He is interested in integrating cognitive and neuroscientific research, recently publishing a broad review on the relation between attention and memory in the Annual Review of Psychology (2024) and on theories of consciousness based on an embedded processes approach in Psychological Review (2025). Cowan has served as Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and has presented various keynote addresses, recently at the 2024 Psychonomic Society meeting.
