Ulric Neisser

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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 (<strong>Neisser</strong>, 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
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Ulric Neisser

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