Ulric Neisser

From G. Lindzey & W.M. Runyan (Eds.) (2007). A history of psychology in autobiography, Vol 9, pp. 269-301.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Ulric Neisser
Autobiography is always a risky enterprise, but it may be especially so in my case. Whatever other people's
memories may be like, my own tend to be sketchy rather than detailed; some of them are certainly wrong. As an
example, I once described what seemed to be a clearly false personal memory in my book Memory Observed (1982,
p. 45). In the long run, however, the force of that example was not quite what I had expected. Thus it may serve as a
useful introduction to the present enterprise, which is my third - and by far my most thorough - autobiographical
venture (cf. Neisser, 1987, 2002).
Remembering Pearl Harbor
The memory I have in mind concerns the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday,
December 7, 1941. Later, as an adult, I clearly remembered how I had heard the news of that
attack. It was the day before my thirteenth birthday; I was curled up in an armchair in the living
room, listening to a baseball game on the radio. The announcer interrupted the broadcast to give
news of the attack, and I ran upstairs to tell my mother. Pedestrian enough, one would think, and
many years went by before it occurred to me that no one plays baseball in December! Here, then,
was a certifiably false "flashbulb memory."
But how false was it? Soon after the publication of Memory Observed, several readers
wrote to tell me that a professional football game had been played and broadcast on December 7,
1941. What's more, the two teams playing that game had very baseball-sounding names: the
"New York Giants" and the "Brooklyn Dodgers." Far from being false, then, my memory may
have been correct except in one small detail, i.e., mistaking football for baseball. Thompson &
Cowan (1985) eventually published that interpretation under the title "A Nicer Interpretation of a
Neisser recollection." It is certainly plausible, and suggests that my memories may be more
reliable than I had believed. But where Thompson & Cowan think that it makes the whole thing
uninteresting, I believe that it leads to a new and useful interpretation (Neisser, 1986). Why in
the world did my memory represent me - falsely - as listening to a baseball game on that
December afternoon?
Baseball occupied a special position in American life when I was growing up in the
1930s and 1940s. Far more than today, it was the unchallenged all-American game. It also
occupied a special position in my own image of myself: I was a baseball fan. I knew all the
batting averages, argued the merits of the players, listened interminably to (radio) broadcasts of
the games. In retrospect, one reason for my strong attachment to the all-American game may
have been that it certified my status as an all-American boy. I may have needed some
reassurance on that status, because I was not entitled to it by birth.
Becoming Dick Neisser
So let's move on to the beginning. I was born in Kiel, Germany. My father, Hans Neisser,
came from a distinguished Silesian Jewish family. (His uncle Albert had discovered the germ
that causes gonorrhea, now called Neisseria gonorrhoeae.) Hans, a well-known economist,
worked at a think tank called the Weltwirtschaftsinstitut (Institute for World Economics) in Kiel.
My mother Charlotte ("Lotte") Neisser, a lapsed Catholic with a degree in sociology, had been
very active in the German women's movement. They married in 1923. My sister Marianne was
born in 1924 and I - Ulrich Gustav Neisser - in 1928, both by Caesarian section. "Ulrich" is a bit

heavy even in German, so I was often just called "Der kleiner Dickie," which means "the chubby
little kid."
When Hitler came to power the Weltwirtschaftsinstitut could not long survive: its
members were all anti-Nazi Social Democrats and most of them were Jews. Foreseeing this
development, my father had already negotiated for a position at the Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania. For safety's sake he left Germany almost immediately; my mother
and sister and I joined him in England a few months later. We sailed for the United States on the
ocean liner Hamburg, arriving in New York on September 15, 1933. I was not quite five years
old.
Soon after our arrival we settled in Swarthmore Pennsylvania, living for seven years in a
big comfortable house near my school and then for two more years in two other houses. (We
were in the last of them on December 7, 1941). My parents chose Swarthmore not for its college
(which I came to know only later) but because it was an intellectual community with a
convenient commuter train to Philadelphia. They enjoyed life there, and I did too. My father had
a good academic salary; we lived well, and I had no idea that America was going through a great
depression.
Swarthmore is where my memories begin, at age 5. I have no recollection of my earlier
experiences in Kiel, of speaking German, or even of the German governess to whom I was said
to have been very attached. There is a photo of me wearing a sailor suit aboard the Hamburg, but
I have no recollection of it: remembered life begins when I started kindergarten in the USA.
Like boys everywhere, I was desperate to belong to my peer group. Becoming a baseball
fan was probably part of that effort. As a player I was a dead loss, the kid who was always
chosen last. (That experience may have contributed to my lifelong sympathy with the underdog:
I am a committed infracaninophile.) Another part of the same effort was finding an acceptable
name. "Ulrich" was excruciatingly German, and my friends couldn't even pronounce it. Luckily a
common American nickname was already in place: "Dickie." I decided to stick with it, and have
been Dick Neisser ever since. Later I dropped the "h" from "Ulrich," again to be less German. In
a further phase I briefly added a "Richard" to justify the "Dick," but that soon seemed stupid and
I gave it up. "Ulric" and "Dick" are both natural now.
Enduring high school
When the war began my father went to work for the Office of Price Administration
(OPA), and for a year we lived in suburban Washington. When the job didn't work out, he quit
OPA in 1943 to take up a professorship at the Graduate Faculty of the New School in New York.
The job was ideal because a number of other refugee scholars - many of them his friends - were
already teaching there. We moved to a middle-class Long Island suburb called Floral Park, and I
enrolled in the nearby high school.
I wish I could report major intellectual developments from my three years at Sewanhaka
Central High, but in fact there were none. The courses were easy, my grades were good, and I
was soon a member of the "Honor Society." (In practical terms this meant access to a room under
the stairs where we played bridge.) That was OK but I was afraid of girls, poor at sports, and
incompetent even in Shop. Once I got a medal for proficiency in Latin, but what good was that? I
thought of myself as an outsider, and of my few friends as weird. Maybe I was weird too.
For my first two Sewanhaka years the war was still on, and it consumed much of my
interest. With Germany now the official enemy, I was even more motivated to be 100%
American. Perhaps as a result, I began to distance myself from my family: not rudely and
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perhaps not even overtly, but with feeling. Hans and Charlotte had foreign accents, scholarly
interests, European cultural values, academic friends. I would have none of all that; their ways
were not for an American boy like me. This deliberate rejection was successful, and I became
100% American in thought and deed. But success came at a price: not wanting to have anything
to do with grown-up culture, I essentially wasted my adolescence. It is in high school that kids
begin to read novels, play instruments, write poetry, form political identities, fall in love. I did
none of those things. I never even went to New York City, which was only an auto-plus-subway
ride away from Floral Park. In later years I have tried to catch up on what I missed in
adolescence, but I'm still a bit behind.
Another factor may also have been important. I knew myself to be a smart kid, but my
father the German-educated professor was even smarter. On one occasion when a school
assignment required looking things up, I asked my mother why we didn't have an encyclopedia
in the house as other families did. Her answer was simple: "Because your father knows
everything." (Half a century later, I'm still not sure if she was joking.) One way to avoid that
particular competition was to stick to things outside Hans Neisser's expertise - baseball, for
example.
In many other ways, however, it was a good life. As the spoiled younger brother of an
older sister, I was indulged and rarely criticized. My parents never tried to indoctrinate me in
anything. On the contrary: for some reason that I don't yet understand, they were surprisingly
reticent. This was the 1940s, and yet there were no discussions of socialism, communism, and
democracy in our house. Did I just not listen? Whatever the reason, I grew up with almost no
views on such matters. An even stranger example concerns the Nazi persecution of the Jews,
which had determined the course of our own lives. To the best of my recollection, we never
talked about it. One consequence of this silence was that I didn't even know my father was
Jewish! Thus I also didn't know that I was Jewish myself (at least by the Nazi criteria), and that I
would surely have ended in a concentration camp had we not left Germany. This seems an odd
thing not to know, but to the best of my recall I learned it only years later, in reminiscent
conversations with my mother.
In contrast, I knew quite a lot about my mother. Although she had rejected Catholicism in
her youth, Lotte still retained a strong religious sensibility. (Perhaps for that reason, my sister
and I were formally christened just before our Atlantic voyage.) Once settled in America she
became a Presbyterian, joining a church in Swarthmore and then another in Floral Park. To
please her I joined them too, though I was fairly dubious about the God hypothesis. My father
never accompanied us to church; I took it for granted that he was some kind of non-churchgoing
Lutheran.
As far back as I can remember, it was assumed that I would become a "scientist." Where
this strong conviction came from I do not know; certainly not from knowledge of science itself. I
had a chemistry set, but was never very interested in it. The science courses at Sewanhaka were
not exciting. Popular accounts of Einstein's theory of relativity were available, but I had no real
grasp of it. In my senior year I read up on atomic bombs and nuclear fission as part of a science
competition, but was quite aware that I didn't really understand the material and unsurprised
when I failed to win. As for psychology, I don't think I had ever heard of it.
Senior year was marked by the acquisition of a first girl friend; we smooched in a clumsy
sort of way, but I was still socially awkward. Soon it was time to apply to college: Harvard was
my first choice. I took the SAT and the Miller Analogies Test, getting a perfect score on the
latter. I applied to the Harvard Club of Long Island for support, and was interviewed by the radio
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commentator H. V. Kaltenborn. He must have liked me: I went to Harvard (the first Sewanhaka
student to do so) with a $400 scholarship. In those days, that was full tuition.
Discovering psychology
College is supposed to be a transforming experience, and it certainly was for me. I
entered Harvard in 1946 with an insecure personal identity, weak social skills, few political
commitments, little understanding of history or literature or culture, and no career goals beyond a
vague allegiance to "science." Four years later I knew just who I was, what I cared about, and
what I was going to do: to become an experimental psychologist and fight the good fight against
behaviorism. Meanwhile I had also acquired a political identity, making many friends in the
Harvard Liberal Union. We picketed racist establishments, sang leftist songs, campaigned for
Democratic candidates, sat through long dreary meetings, debated current issues. I still have a
happy "flashbulb memory" of the 1948 election, in my junior year. Everyone was sure that
Dewey would win; the Harvard Young Republicans had rented a huge expensive hall for their
victory party. We few Truman supporters gathered around a radio in a small common room for a
"moral victory party," and waited for our guy to fall behind. He never did: at midnight, we
marched up to jeer happily at the Republican losers. Glorious!
Being enrolled in stimulating courses on history and government and literature, having
acquired sophisticated friends who read novels and enjoyed classical music, I soon began to
value the cultural life that I had so determinedly avoided in Floral Park. I attended concerts and
rallies, brooded over freshman conundrums like freedom of the will, played cards far into the
night with my roommates. My only problem was the resolve that had brought me to Harvard in
the first place: the commitment to become a scientist. I soon discovered that I hated chemistry
and was bored by physics. What to do?
E.G. Boring's introductory psychology course came to my rescue. I do not know if it
rescued anyone else: Boring was not an exciting lecturer, and his syllabus - reflecting a recent
bitter split between the departments of Psychology and Social Relations - excluded every
socially interesting topic. But whatever he may have excluded, the psychology that remained -
mostly sensation, perception and learning - was a young and vigorous science. One could see
that it would soon be ready to address important human questions, especially with a push or two
in the right direction. I said to myself "I can do this!" and changed my major to Psychology.
Parapsychology
Another stimulus to my growing psychological interests was J.B. Rhine's book The
Reach of the Mind (1947), a survey of research on extra-sensory perception (ESP). The topic was
immediately intriguing, and became more so when I made the acquaintance of S. David Kahn.
Kahn, my classmate, had a sort of personal commitment to the paranormal: his family took
reincarnation seriously and consulted psychics before making major decisions. It was not long
before David and I began to think about doing some ESP research of our own. To make it
official, we called ourselves The Harvard Society for Parapsychology.
At that time, most ESP research was based on shuffled decks of cards. This seemed
problematic because it left open the possibility of errors in recording the scores, perhaps even of
outright cheating. We therefore abandoned cards in favor of the standard IBM multiple-choice
answer sheets (then very familiar) in which the respondent uses a pencil to blacken one of five
spaces in each row. In our experiments one such answer sheet, filled out with the aid of a table of
random numbers, was hidden away to serve as target. The subjects, given blank answer sheets
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and pencils, were asked to duplicate the target as best they could. Their responses were then
mechanically scored against that target, eliminating the possibility of error or bias. These
experiments produced surprisingly positive results, so we published them in the Journal of
Parapsychology (Kahn & Neisser, 1949).
My interest in ESP did not last long. David Kahn and I later spent a summer doing ESP
research at the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, but all our experiments
there were failures. We couldn't even replicate the experiments we had carried out successfully at
Harvard! This was discouraging, and I did not pursue the paranormal any further. It may be,
however, that this early exposure to an exotic research area had a subtle influence later on. I have
long had - and perhaps still have - a soft spot in my heart for exciting but unlikely hypotheses.
Becoming a psychologist
Meanwhile, I was a busy psychology major. It was probably in the history course that I
was first exposed to conflicting theories, especially behaviorism and Gestalt psychology.
Choosing sides immediately, I rejected the former and was strongly attracted to the latter. My
antipathy to behaviorism stemmed not only from its dreary mechanical view of human nature but
from the sheer fact of its dominance. I was already a committed infracaninophile, and Gestalt
psychology was clearly the underdog in any department that included B.F. Skinner. I was
particularly intrigued by the way that Max Wertheimer and the other Gestalt theorists viewed
human nature "from above" rather than mechanically "from below." Köhler's principle of
psychophysical isomorphism, for example, impressed me as an important new approach to the
mind-body problem.
Other courses brought me up to date. I took a lab course from Fred Frick and a methods
course from J.C.R. Licklider, who insisted that statistics required "vigor, not rigor." Jerry Bruner
and Leo Postman taught a course on perception and motivation, focusing on what was then being
called the "New Look." A new course on language and communication, taught by my adviser
George Miller, introduced me to linguistics and information theory. Miller encouraged me to
take more mathematics, especially advanced algebra; he was sure the psychology of the future
would require it. I took his advice, albeit without enthusiasm. Later I was one of two seniors (the
other was Marvin Minsky) enrolled in a graduate seminar that discussed Hebb's new book The
Organization of Behavior (1949).
For my senior honors thesis I needed a topic far enough out of the mainstream to be
"original" (which was very important to me then), but not so far out as to seem crazy (i.e., no
parapsychology). What I came up with was obscure indeed: the influence of visual stimulation
on the auditory threshold. A Russian psychologist had reported such an influence, but his results
were not widely accepted. In my theoretically naive state, such an intermodal effect seemed
attractively Gestalt-like. Miller helped me generously even though he wasn't especially interested
in the hypothesis. Using standard psychophysical methods for the auditory threshold, I
manipulated visual stimulation by turning the room lights on or off. The results were negative,
but I got honors anyway.
Swarthmore
It was time to go to graduate school, and I knew just where. Wolfgang Köhler, one of the
founders of Gestalt psychology, had fled Germany in the 1930s and was teaching at Swarthmore
College. To attract Köhler, Swarthmore had also created a position for his colleague Hans
Wallach and an M.A. program to provide them both with graduate assistants. The students in the
5

program served as R.A.s and T.A.s, took the same seminars as Swarthmore honors students, and
completed an thesis in their second year. It sounded great: I applied and was accepted for the fall
of 1950.
My two years at Swarthmore were happy and valuable, but not at all what I had expected.
Except for one seminar I had little contact with Köhler, who was then wrapping up his studies of
direct currents in the visual cortex. My real teachers were Hans Wallach and Henry Gleitman,
from whom I learned two very different ways of doing psychology. As Wallach's RA, my first
task was to run subjects in a study that followed up on his recent demonstration of the kinetic
depth effect (Wallach et al, 1953). The ingenuity of that demonstration made a deep impression
on me: since then I have always been partial to clever experiments that address important
questions, even if they don't have much by way of theoretical basis.
In contrast with the solitary conduct of Wallach's perception experiments, learning with
Henry Gleitman was an essentially social experience. My fellow graduate student Jacob (Jack)
Nachmias and I spent many hours with Gleitman, an assistant professor who had just received
his Ph.D. from E. C. Tolman at Berkeley. We talked psychology, graded papers, made jokes,
became friends. Our chief theoretical concern was the life-and-death struggle between the
mechanistic behaviorists - led by Clark Hull and Donald Spence - and the Gestalt-oriented
"expectancy" theorists led by Tolman. We had a great time finding flaws in Hull's theory of
extinction, and eventually submitted a critique of that theory to Psychological Review. Our paper
(Gleitman et al, 1954) was accepted and we were proud of it, though I have never heard that
anyone actually abandoned Hull's theory because of our arguments.
My second year was even more eventful. Gleitman and Nachmias and I shared an
apartment, and I developed a social life with the Swarthmore co-eds. Occasionally one of them
would keep me company while I ran rats in my M.A. experiment, a study designed to refute
Spence's theory of transposition. (The rats were uncooperative and sometimes bit; I've never run
another animal experiment.) Soon I hooked up with Anna Peirce, an attractive freshman with a
family in Maine. It gradually became clear that she and I would stay together, even in the next
year when I would be attending a different graduate school. But where would that be, and with
what emphasis? Behaviorism was out, and Gestalt psychology no longer seemed a viable
alternative. The hot new idea was information theory, which I had already heard about from
George Miller. Miller himself had just moved to a new psychology department being established
at M.I.T., so I decided to go there too.
Two more graduate schools
Everyone at M.I.T. was friendly, but I wasn't happy there. None of the ongoing research
attracted me, and no one shared my interest in the struggle against behaviorism. I did manage
one anti-behaviorist experiment ("An experimental distinction between perceptual process and
verbal response," 1954), but it didn't lead anywhere. Anna and I were married (by the Cambridge
town clerk) and set up housekeeping, but she wasn't making any progress toward completing her
education. As the academic year drew to a close, an attractive possibility that addressed all these
difficulties suddenly appeared: Swarthmore offered me an appointment as an instructor! So we
spent 1953-54 there: I taught various courses, Anna completed her sophomore year, and in April
our first child Mark was born.
In the summer of 1954 we moved back to Cambridge so I could resume my studies at
M.I.T., but I was actually reluctant to do so. There was an alternative: Harvard was not far away,
and the Psychology Department might still remember me. It seems that they did; in any case,
6

they accepted me into the graduate program. I was happy to be a Harvard student again, but felt
that I had lost a lot of time in the intervening four years. To make up for lost time I moved
quickly, taking qualifying exams in my first year and completing a dissertation by the end of the
second. My choice of topic was not governed by any theoretical commitment - Gestalt
psychology and information theory had both lost their allure by this time - but by how quickly I
could do the required research. That criterion led me to a rather obscure topic: S. S. Stevens'
"neural quantum" hypothesis of the auditory threshold. I did not have much rapport with Stevens
himself, but his hypothesis made clear predictions and the necessary apparatus was already in
place. I ran subjects, analyzed data, identified certain artifacts in the "quantal method" (cf.
Neisser, 1957) and got my degree.
By that time, oddly enough, I had begun to think that I was leaving Harvard too soon.
Surely it had more to offer than I had learned in two hasty years! So I arranged to stay a third
year after all, supported by a Harvard instructorship (teaching "Sensation and Perception") and
an NIH fellowship. To get the fellowship I proposed a new technique for the measurement of
pain thresholds - still another obscure topic in which I was again not really interested. (The pain
itself, created by focusing a beam of light onto the back of the subject's hand, was not severe.) In
the upshot I did conduct the research but didn't like it much. A complex apparatus had to be built
and calibrated, and I was beginning to realize that I am not good with apparatus. Other people at
Harvard were much better: George Sperling (1960), for example, was doing elegant
tachistoscopic studies of what he then called the "visual image." Later, in Cognitive Psychology,
I would call it "iconic memory."
Pattern recognition
It was time to move on, and an opportunity soon presented itself. Richard Held, with
whom I had been acquainted since my Harvard undergraduate days, was now teaching at
Brandeis and suggested that I apply for a job there. I don't remember my job talk now, but it
must have been OK: I was appointed assistant professor at $4000/year. By this time Anna and I
had four children (Mark, b.1954, Julie, b.1956, Phil, b.1957, Toby, b.1958), so we certainly
needed the money. We lived for a while in Boston and then built a house in Lincoln Mass.; I
commuted to Brandeis (in Waltham) on a motor scooter. We spent most of our summers in
Maine, courtesy of my artist father-in-law Waldo Peirce. It was a strenuous domestic life, and
unfortunately one in which Anna and I were increasingly at odds.
Intellectually, my 7 1/2 years at Brandeis were years of development. The psychology
department itself was best known for the humanistic psychology of its Chairman, A.H. Maslow. I
liked Maslow's idealism, which reminded me of Gestalt psychology. I also resonated to his
insistence that psychology needed a "third force," i.e., a theoretical approach that was neither
behaviorism nor psychoanalysis. (He hoped that the third force would be humanistic/existential
psychology, but it turned out to be cognitive psychology instead.) Harvard was not far away, and
I often attended talks at the recently established "Center for Cognitive Studies" there. All this
was intriguing, but the theorist who influenced me most was neither at Brandeis nor Harvard and
not even a psychologist: Oliver Selfridge of the M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory. Introduced by a
mutual friend, Oliver and I soon found many interests in common. At his suggestion I soon
began to spend Thursdays at his Lab as a consultant, an arrangement that benefited me
financially as well as intellectually. Oliver had no advanced degree; nowadays he would be
called a "cognitive scientist, but no such category existed then. He was working on machine
pattern recognition, especially of patterns such as hand-written letters or Morse code. He
7

addressed these problems with an ingenious parallel-processing model (now justly famous)
called Pandemonium. The model was all Oliver's, but it was I who suggested that we write it up
for Scientific American (Selfridge & Neisser, 1960).
Although machine pattern recognition was intriguing, human pattern recognition was
even more so. How to study it empirically? Reaction time (RT) suggested itself as a method but
seemed to have a fatal flaw: each RT includes not only the time needed to recognize the stimulus
but also times for planning and executing the required responses. It was to get around that
requirement that I devised a new visual search paradigm (Neisser, 1963a.) A subject scanning
down a column of letters/numbers has to process each one to determine that it is NOT the target,
but makes no selective response until the target itself has been reached. The scan rate (i.e., the
slope of the linear function relating the position of the target to the search time) should reflect the
time needed to make each of those determinations. This paradigm was an early and
unsophisticated version of what would soon become known as "mental chronometry." In later
studies, including several done with graduate students at Brandeis, I used it to explore other
issues. The most surprising result (Neisser et al, 1963) was that well-practiced subjects can
search as rapidly for any of ten targets (e.g., for a, f, h, k, m, p, u, z, 9, or 4) as for one. I took this
initially counter-intuitive result as clear evidence for parallel processing in pattern recognition.
The multiplicity of thought
During all this time, I was profoundly ambivalent about minds and computers. On the one
hand computation and programming were obviously a rich source of ideas about mental
processes - a source that I was using freely myself. On the other hand my most basic intuitions -
stemming from Gestalt psychology, humanistic thinking, and everywhere else - were offended
by the suggestion that minds and brains are nothing but computers. Two 1963 papers reflected
this ambivalence. In "The Multiplicity of Thought" (1963b), I used the contrast between parallel
and serial processing to clarify familiar distinctions in the literature on thinking and problem
solving: creativity vs. constraint, intuition vs. reason, productive thinking vs. blind repetition,
autistic vs. realistic thinking, primary vs. secondary process. In "The Imitation of Man by
Machine" (1963c) however, I listed three fundamental ways in which computer processing
differs from human thinking: it does not undergo a natural course of development, is not driven
by feelings and emotions, and typically addresses a multiplicity of motives at once.
One of my teaching responsibilities at Brandeis during this time was a course on
memory. Because the standard list-learning research was rather boring, I focused on topics such
as Bartlett's notion of memory schemata and Schachtel's theory of infantile amnesia. It was to
those ideas that I turned when Tom Gladwin, an anthropologist I knew slightly, invited me to
address the Anthropological Society of Washington. The resulting paper, "Cultural and cognitive
discontinuity" (Neisser, 1962), became a frequently cited contribution to the literature on
infantile amnesia. My interest in these issues continued for more than thirty years, and eventually
led to a new way of measuring the offset of that amnesia itself (cf. Usher & Neisser, 1993).
Cognitive Psychology
Sometime in the early '60s, all this began to jell. Perception, the span of attention, visual
search, computer pattern recognition, human pattern recognition, problem solving and
remembering were all interrelated aspects of information processing. Perception and pattern
recognition were input, remembering was output, everything in between was one or another kind
8

of processing. This was already a rather obvious idea (cf. Broadbent, 1958), but no one had put it
forward clearly and effectively. I could write a book!
The sensible time to write that book would be on my upcoming sabbatical, which was
scheduled to begin in the spring of 1965. But where? I was in luck: my friend Martin Orne was
just then moving his grant-supported hypnosis laboratory, the "Unit for Experimental
Psychiatry," from the Boston Psychopathic Hospital to the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital
in Philadelphia. He offered to provide me with an office there for as long as I liked, an offer that
I accepted happily. For financial support, I applied for and received a grant from the Carnegie
Corporation.
Meanwhile, my domestic life had unraveled completely.Anna and I were divorced in
early 1964; I moved out of the house in Lincoln and into a two-room apartment in Somerville. I
also began a relationship with Arden Seidler, who had three children of her own. These personal
developments made me eager to leave the greater Boston area: it was time to start a new life.
Arden and I were married - this time a real wedding - on New Year's Eve of 1964. A few weeks
later we moved to Bala Cynwyd, a Philadelphia suburb. Arden's three children lived with us; my
four children lived with Anna, who soon moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I
visited them often.
In the upshot I stayed at the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry for 2 1/2 years; that's how
long it took to write Cognitive Psychology. Martin Orne was helpful and generous in every
possible way, as was Emily Carota Orne, his wife and collaborator who was then completing a
Ph.D. in psychology at Brandeis. My stay at the Unit also gave me an opportunity to learn a bit
about hypnosis, which turned out to be useful at several points in the book. I was also offered an
adjunct position at the University of Pennsylvania, which provided a pleasant opportunity to
teach a seminar in collaboration with my old friend and mentor Henry Gleitman. When the
Carnegie grant ran out, I applied for and received an NIMH Fellowship. In short, the enterprise
that became Cognitive Psychology (1967) was supported in every possible way.
The primary goal of the enterprise was to bring together what was known about a wide
range of phenomena: "The term 'cognition' refers to all the processes by which the sensory input
is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored recovered, and used" (p.4). After an introduction that
made this goal explicit, ten chapters gave detailed and often technical accounts of the state of the
art: five chapters on visual cognition, four on audition and language, one on memory and
thought. At the theoretical level the argument relied heavily on the notion of "construction":
perception was a constructive process, speech perception depended on analysis-by-synthesis,
remembering was always constructive, etc. The general tone was positive: instead of attacking
behaviorism I simply ignored its assumptions. "Cognitive processes surely exist, so it can hardly
be unscientific to study them" (p.5). This upbeat attitude may have been one reason why the
book became so popular.
Cognitive Psychology legitimized and interconnected a wide range of research
paradigms, bringing them together by giving them a name. Many psychologists found
themselves in a position like that of Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, who suddenly discovered that
he had been speaking prose all his life! Most of them were pleased by the discovery, and
"cognitive psychology" soon became an indispensable rubric. In the blink of an eye there were
cognitive journals, courses on cognition, training programs in cognitive psychology, cognitive
conferences of every kind. I myself was a star, now introduced everywhere as "the father of
cognitive psychology." It was a heady experience for a young man not yet 40 years old, and its
effect on me was to create something like an illusion of omnipotence. If I had changed
9

psychology once, perhaps I could do it again! And if I could, perhaps I should! Ever since the
sudden success of Cognitive Psychology, I have been haunted by something like a sense of
personal responsibility for the future direction of the field.
As one might expect from a lover of the underdog, I soon developed misgivings about the
book that had made me top dog so quickly. In any case, one theoretical problem with Cognitive
Psychology soon became obvious. All the phenomena discussed there are indeed examples of
information processing, but that doesn't mean that they are all the same. In particular, it doesn't
mean that they are all "constructive." The construction metaphor works very well for
remembering and moderately well for identifying briefly-flashed words, but it doesn't work at all
for ordinary perception of the immediate environment. Because I had not thought this through
clearly, the opening pages of Cognitive Psychology included some very questionable rhetoric.
"These patterns of light at the retina are the so-called 'proximal stimuli' ... One-sided in their
perspective, shifting radically several times each second, unique and novel at every moment, the
proximal stimuli bear little resemblance to either the real object that gave rise to them or to the
object of experience that the perceiver will construct as a result" (p.3). As I was shortly to learn
from J.J. Gibson, this is not a good way to describe the real information on which perception is
based. Given that real information, nothing has to be constructed. Simply put, perception is not
the same as hallucination.
In late 1966, when a few pre-publication copies of Cognitive Psychology were already
circulating, I got a call from Harry Levin In Ithaca. Would I consider joining the Cornell
Psychology department as full professor? Yes, indeed I would! At my job talk in Ithaca I liked
the whole scene, though I was puzzled by some of Gibson's questions. (Why, he asked, did I
think that information had to be processed?). The salary offer was a princely $25,000, which I
accepted happily. In 1967 Arden and I moved to Ithaca and bought a big house within walking
distance of the University. Eric and the girls enrolled in the Ithaca schools, and our son Joseph
was born in September.
J.J. Gibson
What next? I was 38 years old and moderately famous. All I had to do from then on, it
would seem, was to keep up with the literature and do occasional experiments. For several
reasons, that was not what happened. For one thing, my ambivalence about computers and
models became ever stronger. I did not like the cognitive psychology that was now taking shape:
there was too much mental chronometry in it, too many conflicting models, too little about
human nature. To be sure I had included one or two of those very models in my book, but there
they had been offset (I thought) by the more humanistic notion of "constructive processes." That
notion no longer seemed to work.
Meanwhile, I was beginning to understand what the Gibsons (J.J. and Eleanor) were up
to. My teaching responsibilities included a course in perception, and two of J.J.'s students - Jim
Farber and John Kennedy - were my first T.A.s. Their reactions to my (very conventional)
approach made it obvious that they knew something I didn't know, but what? It helped when I
began to read Gibson's The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), a remarkable book
that had come out not long before. What helped even more was to visit the lab the Gibsons had
established in an old warehouse near the airport, and see the ingenious experiments that were in
progress. Conversations with J.J. helped most of all; there were many occasions for these, both
professional and social. Arden and I often played bridge with the Gibsons, who were delightful
company.
10

J.J. Gibson was simply not interested in the kind of experiments that dominated the pages
of Cognitive Psychology - brief presentations of letter strings, for example. He insisted on using
methods that were ecologically valid, so the perceptual systems could operate as they normally
do. Having said similar things about memory myself from time to time, I found this point of
view congenial. It took much longer to understand what he meant by saying that the visual
system "picks up" information that is already "in the light" and need not be processed at all. Well
yes, of course it was in the light: where else would it be? Slowly, I began to see that Gibson was
right on this point too. But where did that leave me? Was there some way we could both be
right? Could information be picked up and processed?
Other aspects of the Gibsonian approach - the commitment to realism, the conception of
perceivers as active seekers for information - were also attractive. I liked them much better than
the mechanical chronometric models that had been inspired by Cognitive Psychology. What's
more, the sixties were in the air. Some of the action was local: African-American students at
Cornell made national news by arming themselves and actually taking over a University
building. Like other faculty, I felt closely involved in what was clearly a crisis for the University.
(The issues at Cornell were eventually compromised; no one was punished. I welcomed this
outcome, though others viewed it with alarm.) Indeed, the whole country was in the throes of
change. Somehow, quite irrationally, this radical atmosphere seemed to increase my interest in
developing a new and more ecologically committed psychology.
Cognition and Reality
Soon I was lucky again: the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in
Palo Alto invited me to spend my sabbatical there in 1973-74. We (Arden and I; Eric, Jenny,
Katherine, and Joe) went eagerly, renting a house for the year in Palo Alto. We had a good time
there, as almost everyone does. I myself gave talks at various universities up and down the coast,
talks that are no longer memorable except for one retrospectively hilarious moment at the
University of California in San Diego. The faculty proudly showed me the latest technical
advance: their computers were interconnected so they could send messages to each other! It was
called "electronic mail." I didn't see any point to it, and told them I didn't think it would amount
to much!
Later that year, Lauren Resnick invited me to comment on the papers at a conference on
"The Nature of Intelligence" that she was organizing in Pittsburgh. Some of the papers focused
on artificial intelligence and others on human thinking, but it seemed to me that almost all were
committed to an overly narrow conception of intelligence. To emphasize that narrowness, my
commentary (Neisser, 1976) distinguished between "academic intelligence" and "general
intelligence." I thought the distinction was rather obvious, but to my surprise it was later often
cited as a significant theoretical advance.
At the Center for the Behavioral Sciences, everyone has a primary project. What project
should I undertake? One obvious possibility, which my publisher encouraged, was to prepare a
revised edition of Cognitive Psychology. After six years this was a reasonable idea, so I tried to
do it. Unfortunately, doing it meant reading the rapidly growing cognitive literature - a literature
dominated by information-processing models and mental chronometry. My dislike of that
literature grew apace, and a day came when I felt I couldn't read another reaction-time study to
save my life. I threw my drafts away and set to work on a different book, to be called Cognition
and Reality (1976). I started it at the Center, but needed two more years to finish it.
11

Cognition and Reality had several aims. One - perhaps prompted by my continued
sympathy for underdogs - was simply to make Gibson's views better known. I thought people
might take Cognition and Reality seriously because of the reputation I had gained with Cognitive
Psychology, and that this would help the ecological enterprise. That aim may have been
achieved. More ambitiously I was trying to change the direction of cognitive psychology itself,
to reconcile "information pickup" and "information processing" in a new theory of perception.
The central concept was the "perceptual cycle." Information is objectively available in the optic
array, but picking it up requires the activity of appropriate neural structures called "schemata."
The act of picking up information changes the schema, enabling it to pick up new information
that in turn will change it further. This cyclic activity appears in every perceptual system,
becoming more efficient with practice and expertise. To pay attention to something, for example,
is simply to engage with the relevant information in an appropriate perceptual cycle. But
although this way of talking still sounds plausible to me, it has had very little impact on the field.
Selective looking
My student Bob Becklen and I (Neisser & Becklen, 1975) illustrated this definition of
attention with a phenomenon I dubbed "selective looking." When the images of two ongoing
events are shown superimposed on the same screen, viewers who follow one event soon become
oblivious of the other. In our study, subjects visually followed the ball-throwing of one group of
players while ignoring a superimposed similar group. As they were doing this, a woman walked
slowly across the scene carrying an open umbrella. One would think everyone would see such a
strange intruder, but in fact very few people did (Neisser, 1979). This effect, now called
"inattentional blindness," has been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years (Most et al, 2005). In
a related study, Lorraine Bahrick, Arlene Walker and I (1981) were able to show that even very
young infants are capable of selective looking. It is a universal aspect of attention.
Another set of experiments explored the possibility of engaging in two perceptual cycles
at once, i.e., of what is now called "multi-tasking." Bill Hirst and Liz Spelke (Spelke, Hirst &
Neisser, 1976) modified a divided attention paradigm originally devised by Gertrude Stein
(Solomons & Stein, 1896), in which subjects had to copy words at dictation while also reading
stories. Their subjects practiced this every day for weeks: reading more slowly at first, they
finally did reach a point where copying dictated words did not interfere with reading at all.
Further studies have shown that this achievement is not (at least not always) based on rapid
switching, and also that the secondary copying task does not necessarily become "automatic" (cf.
Hirst et al, 1980).
From perception to memory
So much for Cognition and Reality, which attracted less attention than I had hoped. There
is no need to mourn its passing: let us be happy that psychology has finally matured past the
point where glib general theories are useful. In any case, it was time for me to move on. By the
late '70's (and especially after J.J. Gibson's death in 1979), I had more or less abandoned
perception for other interests. My main focus was on memory, but I was also increasingly
concerned with issues of intelligence and education. My NIMH training grant in this area funded
several years of stimulating "cognitive breakfasts" with students and post-docs; it also funded a
1983 conference focused on the Black/White gap in school achievement. That conference was
my first opportunity to discuss such issues with African-American scholars; I learned a lot from
John Ogbu and Ron Edmonds and Wade Boykin. Later I put together a book based on the
12

conference, The School Achievement of Minority Children (1986). Over the years a number of
Black professionals have told me that it was important for them, but I've never met a White
person who claims to have read it.
Where memory was concerned, I was again fortunate. One day out of a clear blue sky I
received a flyer announcing an upcoming conference on "Practical Aspects of Memory," to be
held in Cardiff, Wales. Eager to go, Doug Herrmann and I (1978) submitted a modest empirical
paper. (Doug was then teaching at Hamilton College and often attended my graduate seminar.)
At that time I still enjoyed some name recognition; when the conference organizers saw that
Ulric Neisser had submitted a paper, they asked me to give the keynote address as well. Seizing
the opportunity to establish a genuinely ecological approach to the study of memory, I presented
a talk called "Memory: What are the important questions?" (1978). The bottom line was the
claim (quite true at the time) that "...If X is an interesting or socially important aspect of
memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X." The conferees loved it.
John Dean's memory
Perception - at least the perception of the immediate environment - is generally reliable
and accurate. This is not the case for memory: innumerable studies of eyewitness testimony have
shown that even very confident memories can be wrong. But they are not always wrong, are
they? Surely some witnesses must be right. This line of thought eventually led me to a famously
accurate witness: John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel of Watergate fame. Dean's
testimony before the committee that was investigating Watergate - testimony about
conversations with President Nixon - was so rich and detailed that he was dubbed "the human
tape recorder." But it later turned out (amazingly!) that a real tape recorder had been running
during those same conversation, and some of the transcripts were soon in the public domain.
Intrigued by this opportunity to study a genuinely accurate witness, I set out (1981) to compare
Dean's testimony with the corresponding transcripts.
The comparison didn't go as I had expected: the human tape recorder failed the test. In
many cases Nixon simply hadn't said what Dean later remembered him as saying, at least not in
the context to which Dean attributed it. Yet there was also a sense in which Dean was quite right:
there really was a cover-up, Nixon really did approve of it. What kind of memory was this,
wrong on the surface but right in a deeper sense? Endel Tulving's (1972) distinction between
semantic and episodic memory was then very popular, but it didn't quite fit here. Dean's
recollections seemed to be episodic, but were not. Still believing that I could coin useful new
terms as I had done years before in Cognitive Psychology (e.g., "iconic" and "echoic" memory), I
called Dean's memories "repisodic": they represented a repeated set of events. It never caught
on.
Memory Observed
My next step was to prepare a volume of readings and commentary that would show how
interesting the ecological study of memory could be. This was Memory Observed (1982), which I
wrote - "assembled" might be a better word - during a 1980-8 1 sabbatical at the University of
Pennsylvania. I enjoyed the whole process: picking out the selections, writing brief connecting
commentaries, putting it all together. In many ways, my goals for Memory Observed were
similar to those that had generated Cognitive Psychology fifteen years earlier. Once again I was
trying to change the direction of psychology, albeit on a smaller scale. This time, however, I had
no subsequent regrets. The ecological study of memory has developed much as I hoped that it
13

would, and indeed continues to do so. To be sure it has not been universally popular: a 1989
paper by Banaji and Crowder even argued that the study of "everyday memory" was "bankrupt."
I was delighted to see their critique. If someone takes the trouble to attack an enterprise in print,
it must be important!
The Emory Cognition Project
Not long after Memory Observed, an exploratory phone call came from Emory University
in Atlanta: would I be interested in a chaired professorship? In a major-league city? The offer
was generous and the timing was good: after sixteen years at Cornell I was ready for something
new. But what would I do there? Thinking that it might be time to try something institutional, I
asked Emory for the support of what I would call the "Emory Cognition Project." The Project
would be housed in its own seminar room, accumulate a modest journal library, and exist chiefly
to sponsor speakers and hold conferences. It was a modest request, but I couldn't think of
anything else to ask for. Everything went smoothly, and Arden and I moved to Atlanta in the fall
of 1983.
In thirteen years at Emory, I developed various new interests and organized various
relevant conferences. Through Cambridge University Press, many of those conferences became
books in a series called "Emory Symposia in Cognition." I was the editor of the first Symposium,
Concepts and Conceptual development (1987). The second (co-edited with Gene Winograd) was
Remembering Reconsidered (1988), an attempt to reconcile the ecological and traditional
approaches to memory. I had little contact with the third, Knowing and Remembering in Young
Children (1990), which was organized and edited by my Emory colleague Robyn Fivush. Before
listing the remaining volumes, I must describe some other developments.
In the early 1980s, an epidemic of apparent child abuse swept across the United States:
several falsely-accused day-care providers even went to prison on the basis of utterly fantastic
testimony given by very young children. This was soon followed by an equally crazy epidemic
of memory: adults in therapy (mostly women) suddenly "recovered" memories of how - as
children - they had been sexually abused by members of their families. Because it was generally
believed that really vivid memories could not be false, the desperate denials of accused family
members carried little weight. Eventually some accused parents in Philadelphia responded by
organizing the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), a support group for people who
find themselves falsely accused in this way. Because I was one of the few psychologists who had
actually written about false memories (in Memory Observed), Martin Orne asked me to serve on
the Foundation's Board of Scientific Advisers. I was happy to do so, and indeed am still a
member of that Board. Lacking any clinical expertise my contributions to the enterprise were
necessarily limited, but I did present occasional talks on these issues in the mid-1980s.
Fortunately the false memory epidemic has now subsided, partly as a result of the excellent work
of the FMSF. Today, claims of sudden adult recovery of long-forgotten childhood abuse are
usually met with appropriate skepticism.
Flashbulb memories revisited
Meanwhile, a completely unexpected event rekindled my interest in the old problem of
"flashbulb memories." The event was the disastrous explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on
January 28, 1986. While taking a shower the next morning (at least, that's what I remember!), it
occurred to me that the occasion of hearing about such a disaster might become a "flashbulb
memory" for many people. This was therefore an opportunity to get baseline accounts of such
14

occasions, with which later memories could later be compared. I quickly prepared an appropriate
questionnaire, and later that morning distributed it to a large freshman class. Nearly three years
later, when the erstwhile freshmen had become seniors, we asked those who were still at Emory
to recall how they had heard about the Challenger disaster three years before. The results were
astonishing. While a few subjects did remember the event fairly well, a substantial number
reported highly confident memories that were nevertheless completely wrong. One, for example,
recalled that "...a girl ran screaming through the dorm shouting 'the space shuttle blew up.'" The
memory was vivid, but her original account showed that she had actually heard about the disaster
from friends at lunch.
My student Nicole Harsch and I reported this and related findings (Neisser & Harsch,
1992) in the fourth Emory Symposium (Affect and Accuracy in Recall, co-edited with Gene
Winograd), which also included reports of other Challenger-based studies. Our study was
essentially the first to use this paradigm, i.e., getting an early account of the actual reception
event ("How did you first hear the news of ...") and then testing for recall after a substantial
delay. It was, however, by no means the last: every public disaster now seems to be an occasion
to conduct a memory experiment. Generally speaking, most such studies of the recall of
reception events have confirmed our findings
Not long after Challenger, the 1989 California earthquake offered an opportunity to
conduct a study that would contrast recall of reception events with recalls of direct experience.
On the morning after the quake, I suggested to Steve Palmer at the University of California in
Berkeley that he ask as many students as possible to record their actual earthquake experiences.
A few days later, Gene Winograd contacted Mary Sue Weldon at Santa Cruz with a similar
suggestion. In a third group in Atlanta, Gene and I gave Emory students the usual questionnaires
about how they had heard the news. A year and a half later, subjects in all three groups were
asked for recall. The contrast was sharp (Neisser et al, 1996). The subjects in both California
groups recalled their (direct) experiences almost perfectly, while the Emory group produced the
weak or incorrect memories typical of the (reception event) paradigm. Direct experience makes a
big difference!
About this time, I had one last fling with the ecological approach to perception. Several
neuroscientists had recently argued that there are two distinct visual systems in the primate
cortex. The dorsal "where" system controls space perception and movement, while the ventral
"what" system is specialized for identification and categorization. It occurred to me that the
"where" system is rather Gibsonian: it picks up information, tunes to the invariants specifying
the layout of the environment, controls movement. The ventral "what" system, in contrast, is
essentially an associative network. Thus Gibson and his critics were both right, but about
different systems! I gave a number of talks based on this insight (including an invited address at
the 1989 Cognitive Science meeting), but never felt secure enough in my mastery of
neuroscience to actually publish it. Given the rapid further development of neuroscience since
then, this may have been a wise decision.
Self-knowledge
In 1987-88 I had another sabbatical and we spent it in England, the first half in London
and the second in Oxford. A Guggenheim award helped to cover expenses. This time there was
no new book to work on, but I did have two enterprises in mind. One was the "what/where"
hypothesis described above. The other - much more ambitious - was a new theory of selfknowledge,
based in part on J.J. Gibson's insight that all perception involves self-
15

perception.There is always information in the light to specify how we are moving and what we
are doing - i.e., to specify what I was beginning to call the "ecological self." Recent work on
perception in infancy, much of it from Eleanor Gibson's baby lab, had suggested that even very
young infants are self-aware in this sense. On the other hand I had often read claims by social
psychologists and anthropologists that the self is nothing but a social construction, varying
greatly from one society to the next. How could these disparate views of the self be reconciled?
To solve this puzzle I addressed it in the language of cognitive psychology, i.e., by
thinking in terms of information. On reflection, this approach suggested that the self is specified
by no less than five different types of information and hence that there are five different kinds of
self-knowledge. Another way of putting it is to say that people have five different "selves" - the
ecological self, the interpersonal self, the conceptual self, the remembered self, and the private
self. Having drafted a theoretical paper to this effect, I began to wonder where I could publish it.
That problem was resolved when I happened to meet John Rust in London: he was just then
starting a new journal called Philosophical Psychology, which sounded fine to me (Neisser,
1998).
One day at Oxford I got an unexpected phone call from Billy Frye, the Emory Provost.
The University had received a substantial grant from the Mellon Foundation; could I help them
find a way to spend the money? All I could think of was an expanded version of what the
Cognition Project was doing already, focused more directly on the five kinds of self-knowledge.
This was not a very imaginative idea, but it seemed practical. I recruited an excellent post-doc -
David Jopling, whose degree was in philosophy - and together we conducted five stimulating
conferences on self-knowledge. Eventually, these became three volumes in the Emory
Symposium series. I edited The Perceived Self (1993) myself, co-edited The Remembering Self
(1994) with Robyn Fivush, and finally co-edited The Conceptual Self in Context (1997) with
Jopling. I had high hopes that all this would have some impact on other people's theorizing about
the self, but have seen little evidence of it.
The APA task force
Published in 1994, Herrnstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve immediately sparked a
firestorm of controversy. The controversy peaked in the spring of 1995, when I happened to be
serving on the American Psychological Association (APA) Board of Scientific Affairs. The
Board decided that APA should establish a task force to address the issues that The Bell Curve
had raised - issues of race, education, genetics, intelligence, and the like. Then, they asked me to
chair it. I was chosen partly because I just happened to be there, but also because I might actually
be a good person for the job. I still had some name recognition; what's more, I knew something
about the topic and yet had written so little about it that no one was mad at me. At least, those
were my reasons for accepting.
I picked a good committee (some of the members were suggested by various
constituencies) and we soon set to work, deciding on the structure of the report and who would
write the drafts of various sections. I kept the "group differences" section for myself. We
circulated drafts by e-mail, and found surprisingly few disagreements on substantive issues. My
own position was that the Black/White differences are real and important, but that their cause is
not presently known. We worked quickly; the report - "Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns"
(1996) - appeared in American Psychologist only a year later. It triggered critical responses from
both left and right, which I took as a sign that we had written a fair report.
16

The Rising Curve
It was in the course of working on the intelligence report that I first learned about Jim
Flynn's incredible discovery. The average IQ scores of Americans have been rising, at least since
the 1930s, at a rate of some three points per decade! Elsewhere in the world, where there is more
reliance on tests of abstract thinking like "Raven's Progressive Matrices," the rate of gain is more
like seven points per decade. Herrnstein & Murray had christened this rise the "Flynn effect,"
naming it because they couldn't explain it. What could cause such gains? Intrigued by this
mystery at the heart of our basic assumptions about intelligence, I made what had by now
become my habitual response: I organized a conference! It went very well and I was especially
pleased to meet Flynn himself: an eloquent and sophisticated political philosopher from New
Zealand.
It was to be my last conference at Emory: Arden and I decided we had been in Atlanta
long enough. Still having many friends in Ithaca, we wondered whether I could perhaps return to
Cornell. Would the Psychology Department be interested in giving me a half-time non-tenured
three-year-renewable appointment? The answer was yes! So in the spring of 1996 I retired from
Emory, cashed in my TIAA, and bought a little yellow house on the shore of Lake Cayuga. My
duties were not burdensome: I supervised one or two graduate students and taught one
undergraduate course. In the first year I also edited The Rising Curve (1998), an APA book based
on the Flynn-effect conference that I had hosted at Emory. In doing so I was hoping to help
Flynn (an obvious underdog!) in his challenge to the intelligence establishment. The Rising
Curve has been cited fairly often, so I may have succeeded in that aim.
There was still one more book to do: a second edition of Memory Observed, which by
now was seriously out of date. I asked Ira Hyman - once my graduate student at Emory and now
teaching at Western Washington - to help me, and we set to work. In 1982, my problem had been
to find enough good studies to fill even a small book. Now Ira and I had the opposite problem:
the ecological study of memory was booming, and there were far more good papers than we
could possibly include. Anyway we made our selections somehow, keeping some old papers and
adding a lot of new ones. We were generally pleased with "MO-II," which came out in 2000. But
disappointment lay ahead: unlike the first edition of Memory Observed, MO-II has not been
widely used or cited. Maybe the ecological study of memory is just no longer new and exciting;
perhaps books of selected readings are not needed in the age of the internet. Or maybe - it's time
to say this - I've just lost my touch.
One remembered self
More than half a century has passed since the moment - if there was one - when E.G.
Boring's course led me to think "I can do this!" Was there really a single such moment, or have I
just created a "repisodic memory" a la John Dean? The good news about my Pearl Harbor
memory (that it was probably right except for the switch from football to baseball) encourages
me to think that this one may be true too. However that may be, psychology did turn out to be
something I could do as well as something I enjoy doing.
Has my doing it made any difference? Even asking such a question reveals a substantial
level of egotism, but that is not surprising. Autobiography makes dramatists of us all, and I am
not the first who has occasionally been tempted to cast himself as the hero of the play. It seems
likely, then, that my actual role in the half-century of psychology reviewed here was rather
smaller than this essay suggests. After all I was not "the father of cognitive psychology," just the
godfather who named it. (The name was not even very original, given that the Harvard Center for
17

Cognitive Studies was already in business.) I was certainly not a major contributor to ecological
psychology, just a propagandist in its cause. And while I am indeed proud of my role in
encouraging the study of memory in natural contexts, I must admit that it would probably have
happened somehow even without me.
The main thing about developments such as these is not what part I played in them, but
that psychology has moved ahead because of them. It has become a very different science now
than it was in Boring's day, or for that matter in mine: far less dependent on charismatic
individuals and quarrelsome schools, much more closely connected to brain science, generally
doing more research and less talking. All in all I admire the new psychology greatly, but my
reaction is no longer "I can do this." It's more like "Goodbye and good luck!"
Books
Selected Publications of Ulric Neisser
Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. (Also translated into German,
Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.)
Neisser, U. (1976). Cognition and reality: Principles and implications of cognitive psychology. San Francisco:
W.H. Freeman. (Also translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Russian and Japanese.)
Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1982). Memory observed: Remembering in natural contexts. New York: W.H. Freeman. (Also
translated into Japanese.)
Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1986). The school achievement of minority children: New perspectives. Hillsdale, N.J. :
Erlbaum.
Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1987). Concepts and conceptual development: Ecological and intellectual factors in
categorization. New York: Cambridge University Press. (Also translated into Italian.)
Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1993). The perceived self: Ecological and interpersonal sources of self knowledge. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Neisser, U. (Ed.) (1998). The rising curve: Long-term gains in IQ and related measures. Washington, D.C.:
American Psychological Association.
Neisser, U. & Fivush, R. (Eds.) (1994). The remembering self: Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Neisser, U. & Hyman, I.E. Jr. (Eds.) (2000). Memory observed: Remembering in natural contexts (2nd Ed.). New
York: Worth Publishers.
Neisser, U. & Jopling, D. (Eds.) (1997). The conceptual self in context: Culture, experience, self-understanding.
New York:: Cambridge University Press.
Neisser, U. & Winograd, E. (Eds.) (1988). Remembering reconsidered: Ecological and traditional approaches to
the study of memory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Winograd, E. & Neisser, U. (Eds.) (1992). Affect and accuracy in recall: Studies of "flashbulb" memories.New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Articles, Chapters, etc.
Bahrick, L. E., Walker, A. S., & Neisser, U. (1981). Selective looking by infants. Cognitive Psychology, 13, 377-
390.
18

Gleitman, H., Nachmias, J., & Neisser, U. (1954). The S-R reinforcement theory of extinction. Psychological
Review, 61, 23-33.
Herrmann, D. J.& Neisser, U. (1978). An inventory of everyday memory experiences. In M. M. Gruneberg, P.
M. Morris & R. N. Sykes (Eds.) Practical applications of memory.London: Academic Press.
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