Jon and I first met almost twenty years ago, when he visited the Max Planck Institute in Munich where I worked at the time. It was then that we discovered our shared interest in how attention operates across sensory modalities, and began to develop ideas that would later form the basis for our joint research on crossmodal attention. When Jon moved from Cambridge to Birkbeck in 1997, I moved to Cambridge to take up his post. Ever since then, I have benefited from Jon’s true generosity on many occasions. I was a clueless new arrival from the Continent, and his advice and support greatly helped me unravel some of the mysteries of British academia. He freely shared his meticulously researched lecture notes and materials with me, which proved invaluable when I started to teach in a new country, and in a different language. Even now, as Birkbeck undergraduates will readily attest, my lectures on attention and motor control are still ennobled by the Driver spirit. Shortly after my arrival in the UK, Jon invited me to join him and an illustrious group of researchers on a Human Frontiers research grant on face perception, even though I had no background or prior experience in this area. I am sure that without his invitation, I would never have discovered and contributed to the exciting world of face processing research. In the past decade, we were collaborators on several grants, developed new approaches to attention research, and wrote about twenty research articles together. Less than two years ago, we published a paper in Psychological Science which demonstrated effects of reward value on attentional capture. This was meant to be the starting point for a new joint line of research on links between attention and reward systems. It saddens me immensely that this is now not going to happen, and that this paper turned out to be the last one that we wrote together.
Jon was a complex personality, and I now realize with some regret that I did not always fully appreciate and respond to who he truly was - not only a brilliant and passionate experimental researcher, but also, and more importantly, a good man. I cannot even begin to comprehend that he is gone.
