Bernhard Hommel

Prof. Dr. Bernhard Hommel is full professor of psychology at the Shandong Normal University in Jinan, China. Until 2022, he held the chair of “General Psychology” at Leiden University since 1999, after having worked as senior researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychological Research (PhD at the University of Bielefeld in 1990; Habilitation at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich). He is a member and senator of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) and the Secretary of the International Association for the Study of Attention and Performance, and he is the highest-ranking researcher in the field of Psychology & Cognitive Sciences in China. He was co-founder and board member of the Leiden Institute for Brain & Cognition, and president of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN). His research focuses on cognitive, computational, developmental, social, and neurochemical mechanisms of human and robotic attention and action control, and the role of consciousness therein. Recent work also addresses the role of emotion, creativity, and religion in human cognition, and mechanisms underlying personality and psychopathology. He was chief editor of Frontiers in Cognition and is chief editor of Psychological Research. He has edited three books on action control and the relationship between perception and action, and several special issues on attention and action control. He has (co-) authored >500 articles in international journals and >70 chapters in readers and psychological textbooks. He also publishes general-audience books that apply psychological and neuroscientific insights to politics.