A tribute to professor Glyn Humphreys

On January 14th we were deeply saddened to hear about the sudden death of Professor Glyn Humphreys. With this departure, the field of cognitive neuropsychology lost not only one of its most prominent and productive researchers, but also one of the most influential and beloved scientific mentors. Glyn Humphreys was born on 28 December 1954 in Ormskirk, Lancashire. He obtained a Bachelor's degree in psychology in 1976, and graduated with a Ph.D in psychology in 1980, both from Bristol University, England. He then took up his first lectureship at Birkbeck College, London. Inspired by the scientific curiosity of his student, and future wife, Jane Riddoch, Glyn combined his passion for experimental psychology with the study of cognitive deficits in braininjured patients. Glyn quickly appreciated that linking discrete patterns of brain damage to deficits in specific cognitive processes provides a powerful tool to test and inform theories about normal human cognition. He also rapidly became renowned for his research with brain-injured patients, not only because of the scientific merit of his work but also his unusual approach based on integrating patients into the life of his research group through numerous social events, including the famous Christmas parties. Over the years, numerous researchers visited Glyn to work with his panels of neuropsychological volunteers established first at the Brain and Behavioural Sciences Centre within the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham and later at the Cognitive Neuropsychology Centre, within the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. From the 1980s onwards, Glyn devoted himself with enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge to the field of cognitive neuropsychology. He made several conceptually important contributions to the understanding of cognitive and neural mechanisms of visual perception, attention, the control of action, memory, language and most recently social cognition. His work examining the mechanism of visual search and visual selection in different reference frames (e.g., spatial versus temporal search; viewer-centred versus object-centred coding) based on data from neuropsychological patients with neglect, extinction and simultanagnosia, provided an important theoretical framework underlying many papers published in this special issue, which he coedited until his sudden death. Glyn fully appreciated that in-depth study of a single patient with interesting and somewhat unusual cognitive problems can provide valuable insights into the functional architecture of the human brain. For instance, his studies in patients with Balint's syndrome (e.g., Humphreys and Riddoch, 2003; Cinel and Humphreys, 2006; Riddoch and Humphreys, 2004; Cooper and Humphreys, 2000) not only provided insights into the nature of deficits associated with this fascinating disorder in terms of interactions between objectand space based selection, but, importantly, challenged the traditional accounts of selective attention, which emphasized either object-based or