Ulric Neisser

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-
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