Jan Kaiser

Jan Kaiser (1941-2018). He spent his youth in Upper Silesia, where he attended the Stefan Batory Secondary School in Chorzów. In 1959, he began studying psychology at the Jagiellonian University. In 1964, he defended his master’s thesis titled “An experimental comparison of frustration responses between inferior monkeys and children from 2;0 to 2;6 years old” under the direction of Prof. Maria Przetacznik-Gierowska and Prof. Roman Wojtusiak. Four years later, he defended his doctoral dissertation, titled “The formation of early social responses in ontogeny”. In the following years, he worked at the Institute of Psychology at the Jagiellonian University, where he defended his habilitation colloquium in 1975.

He was a researcher with extremely broad horizons, an excellent lecturer, and promoter of dozens of doctoral dissertations defended in Poland and abroad. The subject of his research and publications was consciousness and the study of mental processes by means of observations of the nervous system. Author of dozens of publications.

He belonged to Polish and international scientific societies incl. the International Organisation of Psychophysiology, the British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.

From 1980, he was head of the first Department of Psychophysiology in Poland, operating at the Institute of Psychology of the Jagiellonian University. He served as Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and History in 1978-81 and as Director of the Institute of Psychology at the Jagiellonian University in 1988-91. He received the title of professor in 2008 and retired three years later.