Henri Piéron

Henri Piéron (Paris, 1881–Paris, 1964) was a French psychologist widely regarded as one of the founders of scientific psychology in France. A student of Théodule-Armand Ribot, he gave the discipline an experimental footing and tied it closely to brain physiology, which makes him an early forerunner of today's work linking mind and brain.

He came from a family with university training. After studying philosophy, he attended lectures by Ribot at the Collège de France and by Pierre Janet at the Sorbonne, worked as Janet's secretary at the Salpêtrière, and began experimental research in Alfred Binet's laboratory. His positivist views cost him two failed attempts at the philosophy agrégation, which he finally passed in 1903 with the support of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. His work covered memory, sleep, attention, cutaneous sensitivity and vision, and in 1951 he published Les problèmes fondamentaux de la Psychophysique dans la science actuelle.

In 1923 he became Professor of Physiology of Sensation at the Collège de France, a post he held until 1951. His influence also reached applied psychology: in 1928 he founded the Institut national d'orientation professionnelle, the forerunner of today's Inetop, and trained vocational guidance counsellors. Together with Édouard Toulouse he developed the Toulouse-Piéron Cancellation Test.