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Chris Frith

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Chris Frith
FRS FMedSci FBA
Chris Frith in 2012
Born
Christopher Donald Frith

(1942-03-16) 16 March 1942 (age 82)
EducationThe Leys School
Alma mater
SpouseUta Frith
Children2
AwardsFyssen Foundation Prize
Jean Nicod Prize
European Latsis Prize
Scientific career
Institutions
ThesisIndividual differences in pursuit rotor and tapping skills (1969)
Doctoral advisorHans Eysenck
Doctoral students
Website

Christopher Donald Frith FRS, FMedSci, FBA, FAAAS (born 16 March 1942) is a British psychologist and professor emeritus at the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.[1] He is also an affiliated research worker[2] at the Interacting Minds Centre[3] at Aarhus University, an honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy[4] and a Quondam Fellow [5] of All Souls College, Oxford.[6]

Education

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Chris Frith was born in 1942 in Cross in Hand, Sussex and educated at The Leys School in Cambridge, before reading Natural Sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1963. He then completed a Diploma in Abnormal Psychology and a PhD[7] at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, under the supervision of Hans Eysenck.[8]

Research

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Frith has published more than 500 papers[9] in peer reviewed journals, of which about 150 papers have more than 400 citations.[9] He has an h-index of 225.[9] He is the author of The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia (1992), revised and re-issued (2015),[10] which won the British Psychological Society Book Award[11] in 1996.[12] He also wrote the popular science book Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World (2007),[13] which was on the long list for the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books in 2008 and he co-authored the graphic novel Two Heads: Where Two Neuroscientists Explore How Our Brains Work with Other Brains[14] in 2022.

In 1975 Frith joined an MRC research group at Northwick Park Hospital, dedicated to exploring the biological basis of schizophrenia.[15] There he developed his cognitive account of the symptoms of schizophrenia, in particular delusions of alien control, the false belief that one's actions are being controlled by external forces.[16] Using a predictive coding framework, Frith suggested that, whenever we move, the brain generates predictions about sensory input and that the similarity of these predictions with actual sensory input underpins our sense of agency.[16] Disruption of this process in schizophrenia may lead individuals to attribute their own actions to external sources.[17] This idea continues to be explored by Frith and others[18] and has generated interest among philosophers[19] and artists.[20]

In the 1990s, at the MRC Cyclotron Unit, Hammersmith Hospital, Frith was among the first to apply functional neuroimaging (PET and fMRI) to the study of cognitive processes.[21] In 1994 he became a founder member of the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at the Institute of Neurology in Queen Square.[22] Here he explored the neural basis of cognitive abilities including voluntary action,[23] consciousness,[24] and Theory of Mind.[25]

In collaboration with Uta Frith, Chris Frith has promoted the study of social cognition[26] which has become a mainstream interest in neuropsychology.[27] In 2007 he started a collaboration on interacting minds with Andreas Roepstorff [28] and colleagues at Aarhus University, Denmark. Frith and these colleagues demonstrated, experimentally, some of the mechanisms of advantageous group decision making and the emergence of mutual behavioural adaptation in simple joint action.[29] This former work provided the basis for an animation on group decision-making commissioned by the Royal Society.[30] The interacting minds perspective adopted by Frith and colleagues emphasizes the idea that cognition and social interaction are fundamentally intertwined and that the human mind is shaped, not only by a person’s cognitive abilities, but also by their interactions with other minds.[31]

His former doctoral students include Geraint Rees[32] and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore.[33]

Fellowships and awards

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Frith was elected a Fellow of The Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci),[34] a Fellow of The Royal Society (FRS),[35] a Fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS)[36] (all in 2000) and a Fellow of The British Academy (FBA)[37] in 2008. He was the President of The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness[38] in 2001.

In September 2008, a two day festschrift was held in honour of Frith at the Royal Society.[39] The topic was 'Mind in the Brain'. Hosts included Ray Dolan, Paul Burgess, Jon Driver and Geraint Rees. In 2009 he was awarded the Fyssen Foundation Prize for his work on neuropsychology[40] and he and Uta Frith were awarded the European Latsis Prize for their work linking the human mind and the human brain.[41] In 2014, he and Uta Frith were awarded the Jean Nicod Prize[42] for their work on social cognition. In 2021 he gave the 49th Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture on the topic "Consciousness, (meta)Cognition, Culture".[43]

Personal life

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Frith is the brother of guitarist Fred Frith and musicologist Simon Frith. In 1966 he married Uta Frith, a developmental psychologist. In 2008 they were the subject of a double portrait by Emma Wesley.[44] They have two sons, one a computational biologist and one an author.[45]

Bibliography

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  • Frith, C.D. (1992) The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hove. Classic Edition, Routledge (2015) Translations: Spanish, Japanese, French, Italian)
  • Frith, C.D. & Johnstone, E.C. (2003) Schizophrenia: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. (Translation: Chinese)
  • Frith, C.D. & Wolpert, D.M. (Eds.) (2004) The Neuroscience of Social Interaction: Decoding, imitating and influencing the actions of others. Oxford University Press.
  • Frith, C.D. (2007) Making up the mind: how the brain creates our mental world. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. (Translations: Spanish, French, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, German, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Flemish)
  • Fleming, S.M., Frith, C.D. (Eds.) (2014) The cognitive neuroscience of metacognition. Springer, Heidelberg.
  • Frith, U., Frith, C.D., Frith, A., and Locke, D. (2022) Two Heads: Where Two Neuroscientists Explore How Our Brains Work with Other Brains. (London: Bloomsbury). (Translation: Korean)
  • Frith, C.D. and Frith, U. (2023) What Makes Us Social? (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press).

References

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  1. ^ "Professor Chris Frith". Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. Retrieved 24 December 2010.
  2. ^ "Ineracting Minds - people".
  3. ^ "Interacting Minds Centre". Aarhus University.
  4. ^ "Institute of Philosophy". School of Advance Studies, University of London.
  5. ^ "The Categories of Fellowship. All Soul's College".
  6. ^ "People Listing. All Souls College".
  7. ^ "Individual Differences in Pursuit Rotor and Tapping Skills".
  8. ^ Frith, Christopher Donald (1969). Individual differences in pursuit rotor and tapping skills. copac.jisc.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of London. OCLC 729774222.
  9. ^ a b c Chris Frith publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  10. ^ Frith, Christopher Donald (2015). The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1138811614.
  11. ^ "Book Award BPS".
  12. ^ Frith, Christopher D. (2 December 2023). The Cognitive Psychology of Schizophrenia. Christopher D Frith -Google Books. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781138811614.
  13. ^ Frith, Chris (29 May 2007). Making up the Mind. Wiley. ISBN 9781405136945. [ISBN missing]
  14. ^ U. Frith, C.D. Frith, A. Frith and D. Locke (2022). Two Heads. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1526601551.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  15. ^ Lawrie, S. (2021). "Biological Psychiatry in the UK and Beyond.". In G. Ikkos, and N. Bouras (ed.). Mind, State and Society: Social History of Psychiatry and Mental Health in Britain 1960–2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 151–162.
  16. ^ a b Frith, C.D. and Donne, D.J. (1989). "Experiences of alien control in schizophrenia reflect a disorder in the central monitoring of action". Psychological Medicine. 19 (2): 359–363. doi:10.1017/S003329170001240X. PMID 2762440.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  17. ^ Frith, C.D. (1987). "The positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia reflect impairments in the perception and initiation of action". Psychological Medicine. 17 (3): 631–648. doi:10.1017/S0033291700025873. PMID 3628624.
  18. ^ Frith, C.D. (2011). "Explaining delusions of control: The comparator model 20 years on". Consciousness and Cognition. 21: 52–54. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2011.06.010. PMID 21802318.
  19. ^ Carruthers, G. (2012). "The case for the comparator model as an explanation of the sense of agency and its breakdowns". Consciousness and Cognition. 21 (1): 30–45. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.08.005. PMID 20833565.
  20. ^ "A Meeting with Chris Frith about Schizophrenia".
  21. ^ Brady, F; Clark, J.C.; Luthra, S.K. (2007). "Building on a 50-year legacy of the MRC Cyclotron Unit: the Hammersmith radiochemistry pioneering journey". Journal of Labelled Compounds and Radiopharmaceuticals. 50 (903–926): 903–926. doi:10.1002/jlcr.1422.
  22. ^ "Distinguished alumni - Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging".
  23. ^ Frith, C.D.; Friston, K.; Liddle, P.F.; Frackowiak, R.S. (1991). "Willed action and the prefrontal cortex in man: a study with PET". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. 244 (241–246): 241–246. doi:10.1098/rspb.1991.0077. PMID 1679944.
  24. ^ Beck, D.M.; Rees, G.; Frith, C.D.; Lavie, N. (2001). "Neural correlates of change detection and change blindness". Nature Neuroscience. 4 (6): 645–650. doi:10.1038/88477. PMID 11369947.
  25. ^ Fletcher, P.C.; Happé, F.; Frith, U; Baker, S.C.; Dolan, R.J.; Frackowiak, R.S.; Frith, C.D. (1995). "Other minds in the brain: a functional imaging study of "theory of mind" in story comprehension". Cognition. 57 (2): 109–128. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(95)00692-R. hdl:21.11116/0000-0001-A1FA-F. PMID 8556839.
  26. ^ Frith, C.D.; Frith, U. (1999). "Interacting minds - a biological basis". Science. 286 (1692–1695): 1692–1695. doi:10.1126/science.286.5445.1692. PMID 10576727.
  27. ^ Gilead, M.; Ochsner, K.N. (2021). The Neural Basis of Mentalizing. Springer. ISBN 9783030518899.
  28. ^ "The Royal Academy of Demark - members".
  29. ^ Konvalinka, I.; Vuust, P.; Roepstorff, A.; Frith, C.D. (2010). "Follow you, follow me: Continuous mutual prediction and adaptation in joint tapping". Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 63 (11): 2220–2230. doi:10.1080/17470218.2010.497843. PMID 20694920.
  30. ^ "How to make better decisions in groups - Royal Society".
  31. ^ Shea, N.; Boldt, A.; Bang, D.; Yeung, N; Heyes, C.; Frith, C.D. (2014). "Supra-personal cognitive control and metacognition". Trends in Cognitive Neuroscience. 18 (163–193): 186–193. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2014.01.006. PMC 3989995. PMID 24582436.
  32. ^ Rees, Geraint Ellis (2000). An investigation of the neural correlates of selective attention using functional imaging in humans. london.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of London. OCLC 1006241559.
  33. ^ Blakemore, Sarah-Jayne (2000). Recognising the sensory consequences of one's own actions (PhD thesis). University College London. OCLC 1006041934. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.324633.
  34. ^ "Professor Chris Frith. The Academy of Medical Sciences".
  35. ^ "Royal Society Fellows Directory".
  36. ^ "Elected fellows AAAS".
  37. ^ "Professor Chris Frith FBA".
  38. ^ "Past Leadership - theASSC.org".
  39. ^ "Festschrift in honour of Chris Frith". John Law. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016.
  40. ^ "Chris Frith awarded the 2009 Fyssen International Prize". UCL. 31 March 2010.
  41. ^ "Professors Chris and Uta Frith win the European Latsis Prize 2009". UCL. Archived from the original on 29 July 2012.
  42. ^ "C. and U. Frith (2014) - Institut Jean Nicod".
  43. ^ Frederic Bartlett Lecture on YouTube
  44. ^ "Chris & Uta Frith by Emma Wesley 2008".
  45. ^ "Pioneering neuroscientists Uta and Chris Frith on autism, anti-vaxxers & their 55-year marriage". 22 February 2022.
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