Michael I. Posner is an American psychologist, the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations, and an eminent researcher in the field of attention. He is currently an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, and an adjunct professor at the Weill Medical College in New York. Posner studied the role of attention in high-level human tasks such as visual search, reading, and number processing. More recently he investigated the development of attentional networks in infants and young children. A test of an individual's capability to perform attentional shift was formulated by him and bears his name - the Posner cueing task. In Chronometric Explorations of Mind, published in 1976, Posner applied the subtractive method proposed 110 years earlier by Franciscus Donders to the study of several cognitive functions such as attention and memory. The subtractive method is based on the assumption that mental operations can be measured by decomposing complex cognitive tasks in sequences of simpler tasks. 

September 12th, 1936 in Cincinnati (Age 88)