Ulric Neisser

program served as R.A.s and T.A.s, took the same seminars as Swarthmore honors students, and
completed an thesis in their second year. It sounded great: I applied and was accepted for the fall
of 1950.
My two years at Swarthmore were happy and valuable, but not at all what I had expected.
Except for one seminar I had little contact with Köhler, who was then wrapping up his studies of
direct currents in the visual cortex. My real teachers were Hans Wallach and Henry Gleitman,
from whom I learned two very different ways of doing psychology. As Wallach's RA, my first
task was to run subjects in a study that followed up on his recent demonstration of the kinetic
depth effect (Wallach et al, 1953). The ingenuity of that demonstration made a deep impression
on me: since then I have always been partial to clever experiments that address important
questions, even if they don't have much by way of theoretical basis.
In contrast with the solitary conduct of Wallach's perception experiments, learning with
Henry Gleitman was an essentially social experience. My fellow graduate student Jacob (Jack)
Nachmias and I spent many hours with Gleitman, an assistant professor who had just received
his Ph.D. from E. C. Tolman at Berkeley. We talked psychology, graded papers, made jokes,
became friends. Our chief theoretical concern was the life-and-death struggle between the
mechanistic behaviorists - led by Clark Hull and Donald Spence - and the Gestalt-oriented
"expectancy" theorists led by Tolman. We had a great time finding flaws in Hull's theory of
extinction, and eventually submitted a critique of that theory to Psychological Review. Our paper
(Gleitman et al, 1954) was accepted and we were proud of it, though I have never heard that
anyone actually abandoned Hull's theory because of our arguments.
My second year was even more eventful. Gleitman and Nachmias and I shared an
apartment, and I developed a social life with the Swarthmore co-eds. Occasionally one of them
would keep me company while I ran rats in my M.A. experiment, a study designed to refute
Spence's theory of transposition. (The rats were uncooperative and sometimes bit; I've never run
another animal experiment.) Soon I hooked up with Anna Peirce, an attractive freshman with a
family in Maine. It gradually became clear that she and I would stay together, even in the next
year when I would be attending a different graduate school. But where would that be, and with
what emphasis? Behaviorism was out, and Gestalt psychology no longer seemed a viable
alternative. The hot new idea was information theory, which I had already heard about from
George Miller. Miller himself had just moved to a new psychology department being established
at M.I.T., so I decided to go there too.
Two more graduate schools
Everyone at M.I.T. was friendly, but I wasn't happy there. None of the ongoing research
attracted me, and no one shared my interest in the struggle against behaviorism. I did manage
one anti-behaviorist experiment ("An experimental distinction between perceptual process and
verbal response," 1954), but it didn't lead anywhere. Anna and I were married (by the Cambridge
town clerk) and set up housekeeping, but she wasn't making any progress toward completing her
education. As the academic year drew to a close, an attractive possibility that addressed all these
difficulties suddenly appeared: Swarthmore offered me an appointment as an instructor! So we
spent 1953-54 there: I taught various courses, Anna completed her sophomore year, and in April
our first child Mark was born.
In the summer of 1954 we moved back to Cambridge so I could resume my studies at
M.I.T., but I was actually reluctant to do so. There was an alternative: Harvard was not far away,
and the Psychology Department might still remember me. It seems that they did; in any case,
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