Ulric Neisser

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perception.There is always information in the light to specify how we are moving and what we are doing - i.e., to specify what I was beginning to call the "ecological self." Recent work on perception in infancy, much of it from Eleanor Gibson's baby lab, had suggested that even very young infants are self-aware in this sense. On the other hand I had often read claims by social psychologists and anthropologists that the self is nothing but a social construction, varying greatly from one society to the next. How could these disparate views of the self be reconciled? To solve this puzzle I addressed it in the language of cognitive psychology, i.e., by thinking in terms of information. On reflection, this approach suggested that the self is specified by no less than five different types of information and hence that there are five different kinds of self-knowledge. Another way of putting it is to say that people have five different "selves" - the ecological self, the interpersonal self, the conceptual self, the remembered self, and the private self. Having drafted a theoretical paper to this effect, I began to wonder where I could publish it. That problem was resolved when I happened to meet John Rust in London: he was just then starting a new journal called Philosophical Psychology, which sounded fine to me (<strong>Neisser</strong>, 1998). One day at Oxford I got an unexpected phone call from Billy Frye, the Emory Provost. The University had received a substantial grant from the Mellon Foundation; could I help them find a way to spend the money? All I could think of was an expanded version of what the Cognition Project was doing already, focused more directly on the five kinds of self-knowledge. This was not a very imaginative idea, but it seemed practical. I recruited an excellent post-doc - David Jopling, whose degree was in philosophy - and together we conducted five stimulating conferences on self-knowledge. Eventually, these became three volumes in the Emory Symposium series. I edited The Perceived Self (1993) myself, co-edited The Remembering Self (1994) with Robyn Fivush, and finally co-edited The Conceptual Self in Context (1997) with Jopling. I had high hopes that all this would have some impact on other people's theorizing about the self, but have seen little evidence of it. The APA task force Published in 1994, Herrnstein and Murray's book The Bell Curve immediately sparked a firestorm of controversy. The controversy peaked in the spring of 1995, when I happened to be serving on the American Psychological Association (APA) Board of Scientific Affairs. The Board decided that APA should establish a task force to address the issues that The Bell Curve had raised - issues of race, education, genetics, intelligence, and the like. Then, they asked me to chair it. I was chosen partly because I just happened to be there, but also because I might actually be a good person for the job. I still had some name recognition; what's more, I knew something about the topic and yet had written so little about it that no one was mad at me. At least, those were my reasons for accepting. I picked a good committee (some of the members were suggested by various constituencies) and we soon set to work, deciding on the structure of the report and who would write the drafts of various sections. I kept the "group differences" section for myself. We circulated drafts by e-mail, and found surprisingly few disagreements on substantive issues. My own position was that the Black/White differences are real and important, but that their cause is not presently known. We worked quickly; the report - "Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns" (1996) - appeared in American Psychologist only a year later. It triggered critical responses from both left and right, which I took as a sign that we had written a fair report. 16
The Rising Curve It was in the course of working on the intelligence report that I first learned about Jim Flynn's incredible discovery. The average IQ scores of Americans have been rising, at least since the 1930s, at a rate of some three points per decade! Elsewhere in the world, where there is more reliance on tests of abstract thinking like "Raven's Progressive Matrices," the rate of gain is more like seven points per decade. Herrnstein & Murray had christened this rise the "Flynn effect," naming it because they couldn't explain it. What could cause such gains? Intrigued by this mystery at the heart of our basic assumptions about intelligence, I made what had by now become my habitual response: I organized a conference! It went very well and I was especially pleased to meet Flynn himself: an eloquent and sophisticated political philosopher from New Zealand. It was to be my last conference at Emory: Arden and I decided we had been in Atlanta long enough. Still having many friends in Ithaca, we wondered whether I could perhaps return to Cornell. Would the Psychology Department be interested in giving me a half-time non-tenured three-year-renewable appointment? The answer was yes! So in the spring of 1996 I retired from Emory, cashed in my TIAA, and bought a little yellow house on the shore of Lake Cayuga. My duties were not burdensome: I supervised one or two graduate students and taught one undergraduate course. In the first year I also edited The Rising Curve (1998), an APA book based on the Flynn-effect conference that I had hosted at Emory. In doing so I was hoping to help Flynn (an obvious underdog!) in his challenge to the intelligence establishment. The Rising Curve has been cited fairly often, so I may have succeeded in that aim. There was still one more book to do: a second edition of Memory Observed, which by now was seriously out of date. I asked Ira Hyman - once my graduate student at Emory and now teaching at Western Washington - to help me, and we set to work. In 1982, my problem had been to find enough good studies to fill even a small book. Now Ira and I had the opposite problem: the ecological study of memory was booming, and there were far more good papers than we could possibly include. Anyway we made our selections somehow, keeping some old papers and adding a lot of new ones. We were generally pleased with "MO-II," which came out in 2000. But disappointment lay ahead: unlike the first edition of Memory Observed, MO-II has not been widely used or cited. Maybe the ecological study of memory is just no longer new and exciting; perhaps books of selected readings are not needed in the age of the internet. Or maybe - it's time to say this - I've just lost my touch. One remembered self More than half a century has passed since the moment - if there was one - when E.G. Boring's course led me to think "I can do this!" Was there really a single such moment, or have I just created a "repisodic memory" a la John Dean? The good news about my Pearl Harbor memory (that it was probably right except for the switch from football to baseball) encourages me to think that this one may be true too. However that may be, psychology did turn out to be something I could do as well as something I enjoy doing. Has my doing it made any difference? Even asking such a question reveals a substantial level of egotism, but that is not surprising. Autobiography makes dramatists of us all, and I am not the first who has occasionally been tempted to cast himself as the hero of the play. It seems likely, then, that my actual role in the half-century of psychology reviewed here was rather smaller than this essay suggests. After all I was not "the father of cognitive psychology," just the godfather who named it. (The name was not even very original, given that the Harvard Center for 17
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Ulric Neisser

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