Ulric Neisser

Last updated
Ulric R. G. Neisser
Born(1928-12-08)December 8, 1928
Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein
DiedFebruary 17, 2012(2012-02-17) (aged 83)
Ithaca, New York
Nationality American, German
Alma mater Harvard University
Scientific career
Fields Psychology
Institutions Cornell University
Thesis A methodological study of the quantal hypathesis in auditory psychophysics  (1956)

Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser (December 8, 1928 – February 17, 2012) was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive psychology". [1] Neisser researched and wrote about perception and memory. He posited that a person's mental processes could be measured and subsequently analyzed. [2] In 1967, Neisser published Cognitive Psychology, which he later said was considered an attack on behaviorist psychological paradigms. [3] Cognitive Psychology brought Neisser instant fame and recognition in the field of psychology. [3] While Cognitive Psychology was considered unconventional, it was Neisser's Cognition and Reality that contained some of his most controversial ideas. [3] A main theme in Cognition and Reality is Neisser's advocacy for experiments on perception occurring in natural ("ecologically valid") settings. [3] Neisser postulated that memory is, largely, reconstructed and not a snap shot of the moment. [2] Neisser illustrated this during one of his highly publicized studies on people's memories of the Challenger explosion. In his later career, he summed up current research on human intelligence and edited the first major scholarly monograph on the Flynn effect. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Neisser as the 32nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century. [4]

Contents

Early life

Ulric Gustav Neisser was born in Kiel, Germany, on December 8, 1928. Neisser's father, Hans Neisser, was a distinguished Jewish economist. In 1923 he married Neisser's mother, Charlotte ("Lotte"), who was a lapsed Catholic active in women's movement in Germany and had a degree in sociology. [5] Neisser also had an older sister, Marianne, who was born in 1924. [5] Neisser was a chubby child tagged early on with the nickname with "Der kleine Dickie" ("little Dicky"), later reduced to "Dick". His given name originally had an "h" on the end (Ulrich), but he believed that it was too German and most of his friends could not properly pronounce it, so he eventually dropped the "h". [5]

Neisser's father foresaw Hitler's coming militarism and left Germany for England in 1933, followed a few months later by his family. They sailed to the United States on the ocean liner Hamburg , arriving in New York on September 15, 1933.

As he grew, Neisser sought to fit in and succeed in America. He took a particular interest in baseball, which is thought to have played an "indirect but important role in [his] psychological interests". [6] Neisser's attraction to baseball alerted him to an idea that he would later call a "flashbulb memory". [6]

Education

Neisser attended Harvard University in the late 1940s, graduating in 1950 with a summa cum laude in psychology. [7] He subsequently entered the master's program at Swarthmore College. Neisser wanted to attend Swarthmore College because that was where Wolfgang Kohler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, was a faculty member. [5] Neisser has said that he had always been sympathetic to underdogs, due to boyhood experiences such as being picked last for a baseball team, and that this might have drawn him to Gestalt psychology, which was an underdog school of psychology at the time.

At Swarthmore, instead of working with Wolfgang Kohler, Neisser ended up working with Kohler's less well-known colleague, Hans Wallach. [8] Neisser also met and became friends with a new assistant professor, Henry Gleitman, [6] who later became well known in his own right. Neisser completed his master's degree at Swarthmore in 1952. [8] Neisser went on to obtain a doctorate in experimental psychology from Harvard's Department of Social Relations in 1956, completing a dissertation in the sub-field of psychophysics. [6] He subsequently spent a year as an instructor at Harvard, [8] moving on to Brandeis University, where his intellectual horizon was expanded through contact with department chair Abraham Maslow. [6] According to Cutting, Neisser felt a "deep sympathy for the idealistic humanism" of Abraham Maslow, [8] and Maslow had also been deeply interested in Gestalt psychology. [6] After a time at Emory University and the University of Pennsylvania, Neiser finally established himself at Cornell, where he spent the remainder of his academic career. [7]

While at Harvard Neisser became friends with Oliver Selfridge, a young computer scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratories. [8] Selfridge had been an early advocate of machine intelligence. [6] and Neisser served as a part-time consultant in Selfridge's lab. [6] Selfridge and Neisser invented the "pandemonium model of pattern recognition, which they described in a Scientific American article in 1950." [6] After working with Selfridge, Neisser received multiple grants for research involving thinking, which contributed ultimately to his best-known book "Cognitive Psychology". [8]

Work and career

The rapidly developing field of cognitive psychology received a major boost from the publication in 1967 of the first, and most influential, of Neisser's books: Cognitive Psychology. However, over the next decade Neisser developed qualms about where cognitive psychology was headed. In 1976, Neisser wrote Cognition and Reality, in which he expressed three general criticisms of the field. First, he was dissatisfied with the over-emphasis on the specialized information processing models used by cognitive psychologists to describe and explain behavior. Second, he felt that cognitive psychology had failed to address the everyday aspects and functions of human behavior. He placed blame for this failure largely on the excessive reliance on the artificial laboratory tasks that had become endemic to cognitive psychology by the mid-1970s. He felt that cognitive psychology suffered a severe disconnect between theories of behavior tested by laboratory experimentation, on the one hand, and real-world behavior, on the other, a disconnect which he called a lack of ecological validity. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, he had come to feel a great respect for the theory of direct perception and information pickup that had been proposed by the eminent perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson and his wife, the "grande dame" of developmental psychology, Eleanor Gibson. Neisser had come to the conclusion that cognitive psychology had little hope of achieving its potential without taking careful note of the Gibsons' view that human behavior may only be understood by starting with an analysis of the information directly available to any perceiving organism.

Another milestone in Neisser's career occurred with his publication, in 1981, of John Dean's memory: a case study, an analysis John Dean's Watergate scandal testimony. This report introduced his seminal views on memory, discussed elsewhere in this article, particularly the view that a person's memory for an event results from an active process of construction that may be influenced by a combination of events and emotional states, rather than a passive reproduction. This view has obvious implications for the reliability of such things as eye-witness testimony, and Neisser later became a board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. [7]

In 1983, he became a professor at Emory University and founded the Emory Cognition Project, which was later directed by Robyn Fivush. [9] His well-known Challenger study was conducted while he was at Emory. [9]

In 1995, he headed an American Psychological Association task force that reviewed controversial issues in the study of intelligence, in response particularly to then controversial book The Bell Curve . The task force produced a consensus report "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns". In April 1996, Neisser chaired a conference at Emory University that focused on secular changes in intelligence-test scores. [10] In 1998, he published The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures.

Neisser was both a Guggenheim and Sloan Fellow. [10]

Research on memory

Neisser was an early exponent of one of a key conceptualizations of memory, the view, now widely accepted, that memory represents an active process of construction rather than a passive reproduction of the past. This notion arose from Neisser's analysis of the Watergate testimony of John Dean, a former advisor to Richard Nixon. The study compares Dean's memories, gleaned from his direct testimony, to recorded conversations in which Dean participated. Neisser found that Dean's memories were largely incorrect when compared to the recorded conversations. For one thing, he found that Dean's memories tended to be egocentric, selecting items that emphasized his role in ongoing events. [11] More importantly, Dean combined into single "memories" a combination of events that actually occurred at different times. As Neisser states, "what seems to be a remembered episode actually represents a repeated series of events". Neisser suggested that such memory errors are common, reflecting the nature of memory as a process of construction.

Flashbulb memories

The concept of flashbulb memories was first described by Brown and Kulik in their 1977 paper on memories of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Thus, a very surprising striking and significant event that induces high emotional arousal may yield a vivid, accurate memory of the time, place and other circumstances ongoing at the time of learning of the event. [12] Neisser sought to analyse this conception of memory by undertaking a study of individual's memories of the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion. Immediately following the Challenger explosion in January 1986, Neisser distributed a questionnaire to college freshmen asking them to write down key information as to where they were, who they were with, and what time it was, when the Challenger explosion occurred. [13] Three years later, Neisser surveyed the now senior students using the same survey to examine the accuracy of their memory. [13] Neisser found that there were notable errors in the student memories, despite the student's confidence in their accuracy. Neisser's findings challenged the idea that flashbulb memories are virtually without error.

Neisser conducted further research on flashbulb memories, aiming to clarify the manner in which memories are constructed. One study involved individuals' recollections of the 1989 California earthquake. Using subjects in California, near the quake, and others in Atlanta, far from it, Neisser examined differences in the recollections of those who actually that experienced the event and those who simply heard about it. Neisser used surveys to collect data on the emotional impact of the earthquake and on individual memories of the earthquake to study possible associations between memory and emotion. In the spring of 1991, Neisser contacted participants to compare their current accounts of the earthquake with their previous accounts. He found that, in comparison to participants in Atlanta, the California students generally had more accurate recollections of the earthquake. [14]

Death

Neisser died due to Parkinson's disease on February 17, 2012, in Ithaca, New York. [2] [8]

Publications

Books and book chapters

Journal articles

Related Research Articles

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like cognitive science, linguistics, and economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognition</span> Act or process of knowing

Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge to discover new knowledge.

A flashbulb memory is a vivid, long-lasting memory about a surprising or shocking event.

Theoretical psychology is concerned with theoretical and philosophical aspects of psychology. It is an interdisciplinary field with a wide scope of study.

James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jonathan Potter</span> British psychologist

Jonathan Potter is a British psychologist and Dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. He is one of the pioneers of discursive psychology.

In psychology and cognitive science, a schema describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. It can also be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information, such as a mental schema or conceptual model. Schemata influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge: people are more likely to notice things that fit into their schema, while re-interpreting contradictions to the schema as exceptions or distorting them to fit. Schemata have a tendency to remain unchanged, even in the face of contradictory information. Schemata can help in understanding the world and the rapidly changing environment. People can organize new perceptions into schemata quickly as most situations do not require complex thought when using schema, since automatic thought is all that is required.

Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.

The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science. The preexisting relevant fields were psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science. By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm. Furthermore, by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.

Stephen J. Ceci is an American psychologist at Cornell University. He studies the accuracy of children's courtroom testimony, and he is an expert in the development of intelligence and memory. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Lifetime Contribution Awards from the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Association for Psychological Science (APS) as well as many divisional and smaller society awards.

Autobiographical memory (AM) is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual's life, based on a combination of episodic and semantic memory. It is thus a type of explicit memory.

In psychology, the misattribution of memory or source misattribution is the misidentification of the origin of a memory by the person making the memory recall. Misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes, toward their judgments, at the time of retrieval. Misattribution is divided into three components: cryptomnesia, false memories, and source confusion. It was originally noted as one of Daniel Schacter's seven sins of memory.

A personal-event memory is an individual's memory of an event from a certain moment of time. Its defining characteristics are that it is for a specific event; includes vivid multi-sensory elements ; is usually recalled in detail; and is usually believed by the individual to be an accurate representation of the event.

The Now Print! theory, first proposed by Robert B. Livingston in 1967, is an attempt to explain the neurobiology underlying the flashbulb memory phenomenon. The theory argues that a special mechanism exists in the brain, which issues a now print! order to preserve moments of great personal significance.

Ira Hyman is an American psychologist who is a professor of psychology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. His research is focused on human memory including traumatic memories, false childhood memories, autobiographical memory, memory in social context, and memory for phobia onset. Some of his most influential studies are: "Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone", "Errors in autobiographical memories", "Individual differences and the creation of false childhood memories", "The role of mental imagery in the creation of false childhood memories" and "False memories of childhood experiences".

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human intelligence:

Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American psycholinguist, cognitive scientist, and psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Marian is the principal investigator of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. She received her PhD in psychology from Cornell University, and master's degrees from Emory University and from Cornell University. Marian studies language, cognition, the brain, and the consequences of knowing more than one language for linguistic, cognitive, and neural architectures.

Cognitive ecology is the study of cognitive phenomena within social and natural contexts. It is an integrative perspective drawing from aspects of ecological psychology, cognitive science, evolutionary ecology and anthropology. Notions of domain-specific modules in the brain and the cognitive biases they create are central to understanding the enacted nature of cognition within a cognitive ecological framework. This means that cognitive mechanisms not only shape the characteristics of thought, but they dictate the success of culturally transmitted ideas. Because culturally transmitted concepts can often inform ecological decision-making behaviors, group-level trends in cognition are hypothesized to address ecologically relevant challenges.

Robyn Fivush is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University, College of Arts and Sciences in Atlanta, Georgia. She is well known for her research on parent-child narrative in relation to the development of autobiographical memory. Fivush is affiliated with the Departments of Psychology and Women's Studies at Emory.

Martin Anthony Conway was a British psychologist and psychoanalyst focusing on the study of autobiographical memory, as well as the interactions between human memory and the law. He served as head of the psychology department, City, University of London before his passing.

References

  1. ↑ Hyman, Ira (April 27, 2012). "Remembering the Father of Cognitive Psychology". APS Observer. Vol. 25, no. 5.
  2. 1 2 3 Martin, D. (2012, February 25). Ulric Neisser Is Dead at 83; Reshaped Study of the Mind. The New York Times. Pp. A20.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Szokolsky, A (2013). "Interview with Ulric Neisser". Ecological Psychology. 25 (2): 182–199. doi: 10.1080/10407413.2013.780498 .
  4. ↑ Haggbloom, Steven J.; Warnick, Renee; Warnick, Jason E.; Jones, Vinessa K.; Yarbrough, Gary L.; Russell, Tenea M.; Borecky, Chris M.; McGahhey, Reagan; Powell III, John L.; Beavers, Jamie; Monte, Emmanuelle (2002). "The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century". Review of General Psychology. 6 (2): 139–152. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.586.1913 . doi:10.1037/1089-2680.6.2.139. S2CID   145668721.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Lindzey, G., Runyan, W.M. (Eds.)(2007). A history of psychology in autobiography, Vol 9, (pp. 269-301). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Fancher, R.E., Rutherford, A. (4th ed., 2012). Pioneers of Psychology (pp. 635-645). New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
  7. 1 2 3 Harvard Magazine. (May–June 2012) Obituary: Ulric Gustav Neisser. 114(5):64M.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Cutting, J. E. (2012). "Ulric Neisser (1928–2012)". American Psychologist. 67 (6): 492. doi:10.1037/a0029351. PMID   22963415.
  9. 1 2 Parvin, Paige. "Ulric Neisser, cognitive psychology pioneer, dies". Emory News Center. Emory University. Retrieved January 28, 2022.
  10. 1 2 "Ulric Neisser". American Scientist Online. Sigma Xi. Archived from the original on June 12, 2011. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  11. ↑ Neisser, U. (1981). John Dean's memory: A case study. Cognition,9, 102-115.
  12. ↑ Brown, R.; Kulik, J. (1977). "Flashbulb memories". Cognition . 5 (1): 73–99. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(77)90018-X. S2CID   53195074.
  13. 1 2 Neisser, U (1997). "The ecological study of memory". Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences . 52 (1362): 1697–1701. Bibcode:1997RSPTB.352.1697N. doi:10.1098/rstb.1997.0151. PMC   1692100 . PMID   9415921.
  14. ↑ Neisser, U (1996). "Remembering the earthquake: direct experience vs. hearing the news". Memory. 4 (4): 337–358. doi:10.1080/096582196388898. PMID   8817459.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.