Albert Michotte

Personal

Vocation

Belgian experimental psychologist whose research was focused on perception. This was the theme of his first research, and it was to this field, albeit with a new perspective, that almost all of his work after 1940 is devoted. He also had a reputation for creating new and creative techniques and instruments. His 1945 book, The Perception of Causality, published in French, became the pioneer work in event perception and met with international acclaim. In this book, he shows how certain very simple visual sequences carry the appearance of causal connectedness. Michotte emphasizes that this appearance is perceptual, not inferred by association. However, he did not see the study of perception of causality as a simple isolated problem. Instead he thought of it as he did most of his research, as only one aspect of a broader field of study. He died on 2 June 1965, aged 83. Link to Wikipedia biography