Ulric Neisser

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.
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