Melvyn A. Goodale

Melvyn Alan Goodale FRSC, FRS is a Canadian neuroscientist. He was the founding Director of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience. He holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology, Physiology & Pharmacology, and Ophthalmology at Western. Goodale's research focuses on the neural substrates of visual perception and visuomotor control. In 2025, Goodale was named the top life-time scholar of the visual system by ScholarsGPS .

Biography Goodale was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England in 1943. He emigrated with his parents to Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1949. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of Alberta at Calgary in 1963 and a Master of Arts degree in Psychology from the University of Calgary in 1966. He left Calgary in 1966 for London Ontario where he completed a PhD in Psychology at the University of Western Ontario in 1969. Goodale then returned to the UK where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow from 1969 to 1971 in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Lawrence Weiskrantz. Following his postdoctoral research at Oxford, Goodale accepted a position in the School of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1977, he went back to Canada to take up a position at the University of Western Ontario, where he has remained ever since.

Research Goodale was a pioneer in the study of the neural substrates of visuomotor control, first in animals

According to Goodale and Milner’s two visual systems model, visual perception uses relative metrics and scene-based frames of reference whereas the visual control of action uses real-world metrics and egocentric frames of reference. Support for this idea comes from work showing that the scaling of grasping movements directed towards objects embedded in pictorial illusions, such as the Ebbinghaus illusion along with major advances in fMRI neural network analysis will likely expand on the rather simplistic view of the dorsal and ventral streams, integrating them into large scale whole brain networks.

Awards and honours Goodale is an honorary fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute at Durham University. In 1999, the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science gave him their Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2001 and the Royal Society in 2013. In 2008, he won the Richard C. Tees Award for distinguished leadership from the CSBBCS.

Goodale was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2013. His nomination reads: