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