Patrick Wilken

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Patrick Wilken (born 17 March 1966, Melbourne, Australia) is a psychologist at the Otto von Guericke University, in Magdeburg, Germany.

He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne in 2001 under the supervision of Jason Mattingley and William Webster, where he developed models of visual short-term memory. He subsequently worked for three years as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Christof Koch at the California Institute of Technology. Since 2004 he has been a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Jochen Braun, at Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg.

His primary research interest has been limits of information processing in the high-level vision. Understanding factors that limit visual performance provides insights on how sensory information is managed by the brain. Wilken has argued along with his collaborator Wei Ji Ma that the capacity limits commonly seen in visual short term memory and change blindness are not caused by a high-level bottleneck in the number items that can be attended and/or stored in memory, but more plausibly by an increase in neuronal noise in stimulus representations as complexity of visual information increases.

He has been active in the promotion of consciousness as an area of academic study since the early 1990s. In 1992, he founded the electronic journal Psyche, which in addition to publishing peer-reviewed papers and book reviews, acted as an online forum for discussion of consciousness studies via its lively mailing list Psyche-D. He acted as editor-in-chief of the journal until 2002, when he handed over executive editorship to the philosopher Tim Bayne.

After attending the first Towards a science of consciousness meeting in Tucson in 1994, he promoted the idea of setting up a professional organization to organize future consciousness conferences. This idea grew into the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. He has been active in the organization in various ways, including being a key organizer (along with William Banks) of both the first meeting of the association in 1997, and the most recent meetings organized with Christof Koch at Caltech 2005 and Geraint Rees in Oxford in 2006. He has sat on the Board of the ASSC since its foundation, in 2002 took over from David Chalmers as its chair. In 2006 he was appointed its first executive director.

He is currently lead editor of an encyclopedia of consciousness studies, The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, with Tim Bayne and Axel Cleeremans, due to be published by Oxford University Press in 2007.