Ulric Neisser

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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
Page 1 and 2: From G. Lindzey & W.M. Runyan (Eds.
Page 3 and 4: perhaps not even overtly, but with
Page 5 and 6: and pencils, were asked to duplicat
Page 7 and 8: they accepted me into the graduate
Page 9 and 10: of processing. This was already a r
Page 11: J.J. Gibson was simply not interest
Page 15 and 16: occasions, with which later memorie
Page 17 and 18: The Rising Curve It was in the cour
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Ulric Neisser

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