Ulric Neisser facts for kids

Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser (born December 8, 1928 – died February 17, 2012) was a very important psychologist. He was from both Germany and America. He taught at Cornell University and was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Many people called him the "father of cognitive psychology".

Neisser studied how people think, see things (perception), and remember. He believed that we could measure and understand how our minds work. In 1967, he wrote a famous book called Cognitive Psychology. This book made him well-known and changed how many psychologists thought. His later book, Cognition and Reality, had some of his most talked-about ideas. In it, he suggested that experiments on how we see things should happen in real-life settings. Neisser also believed that memory is mostly rebuilt each time we remember something, not just a perfect picture. He showed this in his studies on memories of the Challenger explosion. Later in his career, he looked at research on human intelligence. He also helped edit a major book about the Flynn effect, which is about IQ scores changing over time. In 2002, a survey said Neisser was the 32nd most quoted psychologist of the 20th century.

Early Life of Ulric Neisser

Ulric Gustav Neisser was born in Kiel, Germany, on December 8, 1928. His father, Hans Neisser, was a well-known economist. His mother, Charlotte, had a degree in sociology and was active in women's movements. Ulric also had an older sister named Marianne.

When he was a child, Ulric was a bit chubby. People called him "Der kleine Dickie," which means "little Dicky." Later, this was shortened to "Dick." His first name was originally "Ulrich" with an "h." But he felt it sounded too German. Most of his friends found it hard to say, so he dropped the "h."

Ulric's father saw that Adolf Hitler and his party were becoming powerful. So, in 1933, he left Germany for England. A few months later, his family joined him. They sailed to the United States on a ship called the Hamburg. They arrived in New York on September 15, 1933.

As he grew up, Neisser wanted to fit in and do well in America. He really loved baseball. This sport actually helped him think about an idea he later called a "flashbulb memory."

Ulric Neisser's Education

Neisser went to Harvard University in the late 1940s. He graduated in 1950 with top honors in psychology. After that, he joined the master's program at Swarthmore College. Neisser wanted to go to Swarthmore because Wolfgang Köhler, a founder of Gestalt psychology, taught there. Neisser said he always felt for underdogs. This might be why he was drawn to Gestalt psychology, which was not very popular at the time.

At Swarthmore, Neisser worked with Hans Wallach, a colleague of Wolfgang Kohler. Neisser also became friends with a new professor, Henry Gleitman. Neisser finished his master's degree at Swarthmore in 1952. He then earned his doctorate in experimental psychology from Harvard in 1956. His studies focused on psychophysics, which looks at how physical things affect our minds.

After Harvard, he taught there for a year. Then he moved to Brandeis University. There, he met Abraham Maslow, a famous psychologist. Neisser felt a strong connection to Maslow's ideas about human potential. Maslow was also very interested in Gestalt psychology. After working at Emory University and the University of Pennsylvania, Neisser finally settled at Cornell University. He spent the rest of his teaching career there.

While at Harvard, Neisser became friends with Oliver Selfridge. Selfridge was a computer scientist who believed in machine intelligence. Neisser worked part-time as a helper in Selfridge's lab. Together, they created the "pandemonium model of pattern recognition." They wrote about this model in a magazine in 1950. After working with Selfridge, Neisser received many grants for research on thinking. This research eventually led to his most famous book, Cognitive Psychology.

Ulric Neisser's Work and Career

The field of cognitive psychology grew a lot after Neisser published his first and most important book, Cognitive Psychology, in 1967. However, over the next ten years, Neisser started to have doubts about where cognitive psychology was going.

In 1976, Neisser wrote Cognition and Reality. In this book, he shared three main criticisms of the field:

• First, he was not happy that cognitive psychologists focused too much on complex information processing models.
• Second, he felt that cognitive psychology did not study how people behave in everyday life. He blamed this on using too many artificial lab tasks. He thought there was a big gap between lab experiments and real-world behavior. He called this a lack of ecological validity.
• Third, and very importantly, he greatly respected the ideas of direct perception and information pickup. These ideas came from J. J. Gibson and his wife, Eleanor Gibson. Neisser believed that to truly understand human behavior, cognitive psychology needed to consider how people directly take in information from their surroundings.

Another important moment in Neisser's career was his 1981 paper, John Dean's memory: a case study. This paper looked at John Dean's testimony during the Watergate scandal. It introduced Neisser's key ideas about memory. He argued that memory is an active process of building up information. It is not just a perfect copy of the past. This idea has big effects on how we view things like eyewitness testimony. Later, Neisser became a board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

In 1983, he became a professor at Emory University. He also started the Emory Cognition Project there. His famous Challenger study was done while he was at Emory.

In 1995, he led a group for the American Psychological Association. This group looked at difficult questions about intelligence. This was in response to the controversial book The Bell Curve. The group wrote a report called "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns". In 1996, Neisser led a meeting at Emory University. It focused on how intelligence test scores change over time. In 1998, he published The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures.

Neisser received important awards, including being a Guggenheim and Sloan Fellow.

Research on Memory

Neisser was one of the first to say that memory is an active process. He believed we build our memories each time we remember something. It is not just a perfect copy of the past. This idea came from his study of John Dean's testimony during the Watergate scandal. Neisser compared Dean's memories to actual recorded conversations.

Neisser found that Dean's memories were often wrong compared to the recordings. For example, Dean's memories often focused on his own role in events. More importantly, Dean would combine events that actually happened at different times into one "memory." Neisser said that "what seems to be a remembered episode actually represents a repeated series of events." Neisser suggested that these memory errors are common. They show that memory is a process of building, not just replaying.

Flashbulb Memories

The idea of flashbulb memories was first described in 1977. These are very clear, strong memories of surprising and important events. They are often linked to strong emotions. For example, people might have a vivid memory of where they were when they heard about a major event. Neisser wanted to study this idea. He did a study on people's memories of the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion.

Right after the Challenger explosion in January 1986, Neisser gave a survey to college students. He asked them to write down where they were, who they were with, and what time it was when they heard about the explosion. Three years later, Neisser surveyed the same students again. He used the same questions to check how accurate their memories were. Neisser found that there were many mistakes in the students' memories. This was true even though the students were very sure their memories were correct. Neisser's findings challenged the idea that flashbulb memories are almost perfect.

Neisser did more research on flashbulb memories. He wanted to understand how memories are built. One study looked at people's memories of the 1989 California earthquake. He studied people in California, near the earthquake, and others in Atlanta, far away. Neisser looked at how memories differed between those who experienced the event and those who only heard about it. He used surveys to collect information on how the earthquake affected people emotionally. He also collected data on their memories. In 1991, Neisser contacted the participants again. He compared their current stories of the earthquake with their earlier ones. He found that students in California generally had more accurate memories than those in Atlanta.

Death

Ulric Neisser died on February 17, 2012. He passed away in Ithaca, New York, due to Parkinson's disease.