Ulric Neisser

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
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