from Kate Plaisted Grant

I did not know Jon personally, but welcome this opportunity to reflect on some encounters with him. I met John and Nilli in Cambridge about 20 years ago, when Jon was a Lecturer in the Department and Nilli was a Research Fellow. They were a formidable and inspirational couple, both making ground-breaking, seminal contributions to the field of attention at the time. I began some very basic attentional work in humans at the end of my PhD in an attempt to generalise some of my findings in an animal model of visual search. Both Nilli and Jon were keen to give me advice, even though neither would benefit from their intellectual contribution. Jon kindly listened to some ideas later (at a meeting in Birkbeck) when I started to consider visual search ability in children with autism. It was clear at that meeting that he was way ahead of me, but nonetheless let me believe that the insights he brought to the ideas were jointly made. I am proud that the meeting resulted in publishing a paper with him. My last encounter with him was at a talk I gave at the ICN a couple of years ago. I am very encouraged by Jon Simons' reflection that his critical toughness was motivated by his belief that potential could be encouraged by hard challenge. He gave me short shrift over a point I made in my talk, and later, licking my wounds, I reflected that he had indeed identified a weakness in my argument that I subsequently went on to correct. But perhaps he would not have commented at all if he not believed the work overall had some merit. The academic world has suffered a terrible loss. My heart goes out to Nilli, his children, family and personal friends.