Jay grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, the most northern city in North America with a population of more than one million people. The city is most known for its deep North Saskatchewan River valley, the oil production facilities that ring the eastern city border (affectionally known as “refinery row”), long cold winters, and hockey. Jay was 14 when the 17 year-old Wayne Gretzky joined the Edmonton Oilers of the now defunct World Hockey Association. The young and wiry Gretzky quickly became the best player in the WHA, and then in the NHL, accomplishing things that had never been seen before. Watching Gretzky and the Stanley Cup winning Oilers teams of the 1980s led to Jay’s life-long interest in how people rapidly acquire visual information and use that information to produce actions.  

Although neither of his parents had education beyond high school, they encouraged Jay to continue his education and, like many of his high school friends, he attended the University of Alberta. After a relatively noncommittal approach to his first two years at the U of A, Jay enrolled in a class called “Human Performance”, a psychology course taught by Dr. Robert (“Willy”) Wilberg from the Faculty of Physical Education. Willy taught the combination lab/lecture course in his Phys Ed lab, and this proved a transformative experience for Jay as he fell in love with the course material (motor control, motor learning, cognition of sports). Following the course, Willy hired Jay as a summer research assistant and he was hooked. Given Jay’s very uneven transcript at that time, Willy recommended a series of courses (e.g., cognitive psychology, neuroanatomy, statistics) and said that if a sufficient grade average was obtained, he’d accept Jay into the Phys Ed MSc program. With a more committed approach, Jay obtained a sufficient grade average. The two would stay in touch until Willy passed away in 2021.   

During his MSc, Jay worked on a series of projects focusing on motor learning and the role of feedback. He and his colleagues (who remain good friends to this day), however, started reading more and more on visual attention, action, and cognition by researchers such a Michael Posner, Steven Keele, and Mel Goodale. He also published his first paper (“A survey of the race profiles of cyclists in the pursuit and kilo track events”), reflecting Jay’s own road and velodrome bike racing activities of the time. With his MSc finishing up, Willy recommended that Jay look to the United States for his PhD. One of his top choices was Steven Keele at Oregon, but upon contacting him, he indicated he was half retired and instead offered the names of the best young researchers in the area that Jay should consider. One was Richard Abrams at Washington University in St. Louis. After considering his options, Jay accepted the graduate school offer from WashU.    

Jay describes his doctorate years at WashU as the most fun it is possible to have in graduate school. He made lifelong friends from both cycling and various hockey teams, and enjoyed going to Cardinals and Blues games. He met his future spouse, Alison Chasteen, also a graduate student in psychology. And he and Richard formed a terrific collaboration, both personally and professionally, that propelled an exciting program of research. Beginning with work on the motor control of guided limb movements, they moved onto eye movements, visual cognition, and even some aging research (with Alison).  A series of papers on an attentional phenomenon known as “inhibition of return” (an attentional mechanism that bias attention toward novel locations/objects and away from those previously examined) characterized their research of that time. Jay published 12 papers while at WashU, with 16 Pratt and Abrams papers ultimately coming from his graduate schoolwork, and 5 more papers with Richard since then.   

Three days before defending his PhD in May 1996, Fergus Craik from the University of Toronto phoned Jay in St. Louis and offered him an Assistant Professor position in their Psychology Department. Jay quickly accepted, and he has been there ever since. Over the years, his research program still includes motor control and eye movements, but has expanded into many aspects of attention, perception, learning, and cognition. His lab is currently working on topics such as event binding, cognitive physics, the temporal order of events, the interaction of attention and ensemble processing, attention and working memory, and, in a return to his past, inhibition of return. Jay is a Full Professor, having published more than 265 articles, and with more than 30 of his undergrads, grads, and postdocs becoming professors or scientists. He has been awarded the U of T’s Faculty Award of Excellence, the Psychonomic Society’s Mid-Career Award, and is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychology and the Royal Society of Canada. He has also done over 15 years of administrative service, including serving as the Chair of Psychology, Acting Vice-Provost, Vice-Dean Research & Infrastructure, and Interim Vice-Dean Graduate.  

Following a postdoc at the University of Michigan, Alison joined the U of T Psychology Department in 1999, going on to become a Full Professor and also serving in a variety of administrative roles at the university. This spring, Jay and Alison’s daughter, Avery, will graduate from Gettysburg College with a degree in business management and organizations. Although both Jay and Alison have retired from playing hockey, they remain avid cyclists, and enjoy going to sporting events in Canada and the United States, taking advantage of the rich food scene in Toronto, and travelling the world.