Albert Michotte

Albert Michotte (1881 to 1965) was a Belgian experimental psychologist born in Brussels into a noble Catholic family. He studied philosophy at the University of Leuven, took a doctorate in 1900 with a thesis on Spencer's ethics, then turned to experimental work, spending part of each year from 1905 to 1908 with Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig and Oswald Külpe at Würzburg. After the war he rebuilt psychology at Leuven and in 1944 organised its Institut de Psychologie. His main subject was perception, and his 1946 book The Perception of Causality became a pioneering work in event perception, arguing that simple visual sequences produce an impression of causal connection that is perceptual, not inferred. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1956.