Mark H. Johnson

Who is Mark H. Johnson?

Mark Johnson is a British cognitive neuroscientist who since 1997 is head of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London.

In 1996, Johnson co-authored, the book Rethinking Innateness, a book which examines neural network approaches to development. In the book, Elman et al. propose that genetic information might provide “constraints” on how a dynamic network responds to the environment during learning. For example, they suggest that a learning system can be seen as being subject to architectural constraints during development, an idea that gave birth to the neural network field of constructivist modelling. Rethinking Innateness has received more than 1,500 citations, and was nominated as one of the “One hundred most influential works in cognitive science from the 20th Century”.

Johnson has gone on to develop an Interactive Specialization approach to development, that views cognitive brain development as a series of back-propagated interactions between genetics, brain, body and environment. This model of cognitive development emphasises that development is a stochastic, network-based, interactive process.