Professor Jan Theeuwes is a distinguished cognitive scientist and leading authority in visual attention and perception research. He currently serves as Full Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and holds dual appointments in the Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences and the Institute for Brain and Behavior Amsterdam (iBBA), which he founded in 2016. After earning his BSc in Mechanical Engineering in 1981, he shifted to psychology, receiving his BSc and MSc in Experimental Psychology cum laude from Tilburg University in 1987. He completed his PhD cum laude from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 1992 under advisor Andries F. Sanders and subsequently worked at the TNO Human Factors Institute from 1988 to 1999, conducting applied research for government agencies and automotive companies including BMW, Volvo, and Caterpillar.
Professor Theeuwes has published over 250 peer-reviewed papers with more than 47,000 citations, establishing seminal contributions to our understanding of attentional mechanisms, oculomotor control, and visual cognition. His groundbreaking research on attentional and oculomotor capture has fundamentally reshaped theories of visual attention, demonstrating how salient stimuli automatically capture attention and eye movements even when irrelevant to task goals. He pioneered the application of cognitive psychology to road safety, publishing influential work in 1995 that suggested a new approach to road design now widely implemented in transportation systems. His 2012 book Designing Safe Road Systems synthesized decades of research on driver attention and perception, becoming a key reference for transportation engineers worldwide, while his laboratory's innovative multimodal approach combining eye tracking, fMRI, ERP, and behavioral measures has set new standards in cognitive neuroscience methodology.
Beyond his research achievements, Professor Theeuwes has been instrumental in building cognitive neuroscience capacity through founding the highly regarded international Research Master in Cognitive Neuropsychology in 2007, which continues to attract excellent students from around the world. He served as president of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) from 2016 to 2018 and remains a principal advisor to the Dutch Department of Transportation (Rijkswaterstaat) on road design and safety. In 2024, he co-founded Attention Architects, a company applying eye tracking expertise to real-world settings, demonstrating his continued commitment to translating basic research into practical applications. His current ERC-funded research focuses on statistical learning mechanisms in attention and emotion, exploring how humans automatically acquire knowledge about environmental regularities, while his role as Distinguished Visiting Research Professor at the William James Center for Research in Lisbon and visiting professor at Zhejiang University ensures his ongoing influence on the global cognitive science community.
