Ulrich Neisser
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Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser (December 8, 1928 – February 17, 2012) was a German-American psychologist,
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professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of
cognitive psychology 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, whi ...
". Neisser researched and wrote about perception and memory. He posited that a person's mental processes could be measured and subsequently analyzed.Martin, D. (2012, February 25). Ulric Neisser Is Dead at 83; Reshaped Study of the Mind.
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. Pp. A20.
In 1967, Neisser published ''Cognitive Psychology'', which he later said was considered an attack on behaviorist psychological paradigms. ''Cognitive Psychology'' brought Neisser instant fame and recognition in the field of psychology. While ''Cognitive Psychology'' was considered unconventional, it was Neisser's ''Cognition and Reality'' that contained some of his most controversial ideas. A main theme in ''Cognition and Reality'' is Neisser's advocacy for experiments on perception occurring in natural ("ecologically valid") settings. Neisser postulated that memory is, largely, reconstructed and not a snap shot of the moment. 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 Human intelligence is the Intellect, intellectual capability of humans, which is marked by complex Cognition, cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness. Using their intelligence, humans are able to learning, learn, Concept ...
and edited the first major scholarly monograph on the
Flynn effect The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century, named after researcher James Flynn (academic), James Flyn ...
. A ''
Review of General Psychology ''Review of General Psychology'' is the quarterly scientific journal of the American Psychological Association Division 1: The Society for general psychology. The journal publishes cross-disciplinary psychological articles that are conceptual, theo ...
'' survey, published in 2002, ranked Neisser as the 32nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.


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 Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. The term sociol ...
.Lindzey, G., Runyan, W.M. (Eds.)(2007). A history of psychology in autobiography, Vol 9, (pp. 269-301). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Neisser also had an older sister, Marianne, who was born in 1924. 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". 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 Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...
'', 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 Baseball is a bat-and-ball games, bat-and-ball sport played between two team sport, teams of nine players each, taking turns batting (baseball), batting and Fielding (baseball), fielding. The game occurs over the course of several Pitch ...
, which is thought to have played an "indirect but important role in ispsychological interests".Fancher, R.E., Rutherford, A. (4 th ed., 2012). Pioneers of Psychology (pp. 635-645). New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Neisser's attraction to baseball alerted him to an idea that he would later call a " flashbulb memory".


Education

Neisser attended Harvard University in the late 1940s, graduating in 1950 with a
summa cum laude Latin honors are a system of Latin phrases used in some colleges and universities to indicate the level of distinction with which an academic degree has been earned. The system is primarily used in the United States. It is also used in some Sout ...
in psychology.Harvard Magazine. (May–June 2012) Obituary: Ulric Gustav Neisser. 114(5):64M. He subsequently entered the master's program at
Swarthmore College Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the e ...
. Neisser wanted to attend Swarthmore College because that was where Wolfgang Kohler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, was a faculty member. 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 Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology and a theory of perception that emphasises the processing of entire patterns and configurations, and not merely individual components. It emerged in the early twent ...
, 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. Neisser also met and became friends with a new assistant professor,
Henry Gleitman Henry Gleitman (January 4, 1925 – September 2, 2015) was a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Personal life Gleitman obtained both his bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology: the bachelor's degree from the City C ...
, who later became well known in his own right. Neisser completed his master's degree at Swarthmore in 1952. 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 Psychophysics is the field of psychology which quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimulus (physiology), stimuli and the sensation (psychology), sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described ...
. He subsequently spent a year as an instructor at
Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...
, moving on to Brandeis University, where his intellectual horizon was expanded through contact with department chair
Abraham Maslow Abraham Harold Maslow ( ; April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actua ...
. According to Cutting, Neisser felt a "deep sympathy for the idealistic humanism" of Abraham Maslow, and Maslow had also been deeply interested in Gestalt psychology. 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. While at Harvard Neisser became friends with Oliver Selfridge, a young computer scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratories. Selfridge had been an early advocate of machine intelligence, and Neisser served as a part-time consultant in Selfridge's lab. Selfridge and Neisser invented the "pandemonium model of pattern recognition, which they described in a Scientific American article in 1950." After working with Selfridge, Neisser received multiple grants for research involving thinking, which contributed ultimately to his best-known book "Cognitive Psychology"''.


Work and career

The rapidly developing field of
cognitive psychology 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, whi ...
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 In cognitive psychology, information processing is an approach to the goal of understanding human thinking that treats cognition as essentially Computing, computational in nature, with the mind being the ''software'' and the brain being the ''hard ...
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 In the behavioral sciences, ecological validity is often used to refer to the judgment of whether a given study's variables and conclusions (often collected in lab) are sufficiently relevant to its population (e.g. the "real world" context). Psycho ...
. 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 Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development ...
,
Eleanor Gibson Eleanor Jack Gibson (7 December 1910 – 30 December 2002) was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her firs ...
. 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 of John Dean's
Watergate scandal The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal in the United States involving the Presidency of Richard Nixon, administration of President Richard Nixon. The scandal began in 1972 and ultimately led to Resignation of Richard Nixon, Nix ...
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. In 1983, he became a professor at
Emory University Emory University is a private university, private research university in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It was founded in 1836 as Emory College by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory. Its main campu ...
and founded the Emory Cognition Project, which was later directed by Robyn Fivush. His well-known Challenger study was conducted while he was at Emory. In 1995, he headed an
American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychologists in the United States, and the largest psychological association in the world. It has over 170,000 members, including scientists, educators, clin ...
task force that reviewed controversial issues in the study of intelligence, in response particularly to then controversial book ''
The Bell Curve ''The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life'' is a 1994 book by the psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influe ...
''. The task force produced a consensus report " Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns". In April 1996, Neisser chaired a conference at
Emory University Emory University is a private university, private research university in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It was founded in 1836 as Emory College by the Methodist Episcopal Church and named in honor of Methodist bishop John Emory. Its main campu ...
that focused on secular changes in intelligence-test scores. In 1998, he published ''The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures''. Neisser was both a Guggenheim and Sloan Fellow.


Research on memory

Neisser was an early exponent of one of the key conceptualizations of memory, namely, 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 Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 until Resignation of Richard Nixon, his resignation in 1974. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican ...
. 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.Neisser, U. (1981). John Dean's memory: A case study.
Cognition 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, ...
,9, 102-115.
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. 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. Three years later, Neisser surveyed the now senior students using the same survey to examine the accuracy of their memory. 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 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.


Death

Neisser died due to
Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease (PD), or simply Parkinson's, is a neurodegenerative disease primarily of the central nervous system, affecting both motor system, motor and non-motor systems. Symptoms typically develop gradually and non-motor issues become ...
on February 17, 2012, in
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.


Publications


Books and book chapters

* Neisser, U. (1967). ''Cognitive psychology.'' Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. * Neisser, U. (1976). ''Cognition and reality: Principles and implications of cognitive psychology''. New York: Freeman. *Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1982). ''Memory observed: Remembering in natural contexts''. New York: Worth Publishers. * Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1987). ''Concepts and conceptual development: Ecological and intellectual factors in categorization (Emory Symposia in Cognition 1)'' New York, NY US: Cambridge University Press. * Neisser, U., & Winograd, E. (Eds.). (1988). ''Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory (Emory Symposia in Cognition 2)'' Cambridge University Press. * Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd, U. Neisser (Eds.), ''Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies of 'flashbulb' memories (Emory Symposia in Cognition 4)'' (pp. 9–31). New York, NY US: Cambridge University Press. * Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1993). ''The Perceived self: Ecological and interpersonal sources of self-knowledge (Emory Symposia in Cognition 5)''. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press. * Neisser, U., & Fivush, R. (Eds.) (1994). ''The remembering self: Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative (Emory Symposia in Cognition 6)''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Neisser, U., & Jopling, D. A. (Eds.) (1997). ''The conceptual self in context: Culture, experience, self-understanding (Emory Symposia in Cognition 7)'' New York, NY US: Cambridge University Press. * Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1998). ''The rising curve: Long-term gains in IQ and related measures''. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. * Neisser, U. (2003). Cognitive psychology. In, ''The history of psychology: Fundamental questions ''(pp. 447–466). New York, NY US: Oxford University Press. * Neisser, U., & Winograd, E. (2006). ''Remembering reconsidered: Ecological and traditional approaches to the study of memory''. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. * Neisser, U. (2007). Ulric Neisser. In G. Lindzey, W. M. Runyan (Eds.), ''A history of psychology in autobiography, Vol. IX'' (pp. 269–301). Washington, DC US: American Psychological Association.


Journal articles

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References


Further reading

*


External links


Biografia de Ulric Neisser
at psicoloucos.com.. {{DEFAULTSORT:Neisser, Ulric 1928 births 2012 deaths 20th-century American psychologists 21st-century American psychologists American cognitive psychologists Cornell University faculty Deaths from Parkinson's disease in the United States German cognitive neuroscientists Emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States Harvard College alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Memory researchers People involved in race and intelligence controversies Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni