István Winkler (born 8 February 1958) is a Hungarian psychologist. He is Scientific Advisor (2005–present) and Head of the Department of General Psychology (2000–present) at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Professor of the Institute of Psychology, Szeged, since 2008. His fields of research are perception, memory and event-related brain potentials.

Biography

Winkler was born in Budapest and graduated from the Radnóti Miklós Training High School of the Eötvös Loránd University. He then studied at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and graduated in 1981. From 1980, he studied psychology at the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University, and went on to attain a diploma in psychology in 1985. Having made a commitment to psychology, he entered the psychology PhD program at the University of Helsinki in 1990, and received his PhD degree there, in 1993. In 1996, he was qualified as a Docent at the University of Helsinki. He defended his DSc dissertation in Budapest, at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in 2005. He has been a professor at the Institute of Psychology, Szeged, since 2008. He has published over 100 papers in leading psychophysiological journals (such as the European Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Psychophysiology, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Brain Research and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, United States). He is an internationally well-known researcher of auditory electrophysiology with widespread research collaborations both with Hungarian and foreign researchers. In 2009, together with Henkjan Honing, he showed that newborn infants already have a sense of rhythm. These results suggest that innate perceptual processes support early preference for music and fast acquisition of communications skills.

Selected studies

In Hungarian

In English

Society fellowships

Awards