Ulrich Neisser

Have you ever heard of “flashbulb” memories? It's a type of memory linked to strong emotions caused by a big event, such as the Challenger tragedy. Ulric Neisser put this to the test in one of his experiments. Within 24 hours of the disaster, participants recalled the incident and repeated the same procedure after two years.

Even though they were confident in their memories, the results turned out differently. He concluded that people might alter their recollections over time by repeatedly reciting the same stories to other people. In addition to his work on memory, Ulric Neisser accomplished a great deal more, earning him the title “father of cognitive psychology.”

• Who is Ulrich Neisser?

• How did Ulrich Neisser conduct his experiment?

• What did Ulrich Neisser conclude from his investigation?

• What is Ulrich Neisser's perceptual cycle hypothesis?

• What did Ulrich Neisser contribute to psychology?

Ulrich Neisser: Biography

Ulrich Neisser, StudySmarter Original

Ulrich Neisser, also known as Ulric or Dick, was born on December 8, 1928, in Kiel, Germany. When Hitler and the Nazis assumed power in 1933, Neisser and his family relocated to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where his father taught at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Neisser entered Harvard in 1946, studying physics and later learning about psychology from George Miller, his advisor. In 1952, he finished his master's degree at Swarthmore College while working with Wolfgang Kohler, Hans Wallach, and Henry Gleitman. Neisser returned to Harvard, earned a PhD in 1956, and remained for another year as an instructor.

In 1957, Neisser worked as a psychology professor at Brandeis University and became interested in cognitive psychology, where he and Oliver Selfridge worked on the pandemonium pattern recognition model. After Neisser published his first piece, Cognitive Psychology, in 1967, he moved to Cornell University.

He did some more work in the field of cognitive psychology, including Cognition and Reality, Memory Observed, and tackling real-world memory problems, until he later moved to Emory University in 1983, where Ulric continued his academic career. In the 1990s, Neisser also became interested in intelligence investigations. In 1998, he left Emory University and returned to Cornell as a professor emeritus of psychology, where he taught for five more years.

Ulric Neisser died from Parkinson's disease on February 17, 2012, at 83.

George Miller and Ulric Neisser

George Miller, a psychology professor at Harvard, had an indelible impact on Ulric Neisser, a physics major at the time, leading him to abandon physics and pursue a career in psychology, where Miller became his advisor. Neisser learned about information theory from George Miller, which compares the mind to a computer in terms of how it processes information and stores it in memory. According to George Miller's theory, our short-term memory can only simultaneously hold five to nine pieces of information. When Ulric Neisser's former advisor moved to MIT, he went there briefly before accepting an offer to teach at Swarthmore College.

Ulrich Neisser: Experiments

Ulrich Neisser's profound interest in cognitive psychology, memory, and perception led him to a series of experiments that would later revolutionize the field of cognitive psychology.

Selective Looking

Illustration of ball game and hand game presented to the participants, StudySmarter Original

In this experiment, Ulric Neisser and Robert Becklen (1975) sought to understand how a stimulus's visual presentation and optical distance can influence selection, attention, and perception. They presented two types of episodes in binocular and dichoptic views. Both eyes see two overlapping episodes in binocular vision. In the dichoptic vision, each eye sees a different episode.

Illustration of superimposed events, StudySmarter Original

Neisser and Becklen asked 24 Cornell undergraduates to watch two superimposed events (a hand game and a ballgame) happening at once on a video screen. They conducted ten trials for each subject. The first four trials were fast episodes, which meant 40 ball passes (ball game video) and hand slaps (hand game video). Subjects either watched one or two episodes simultaneously, pressing buttons when something important happened in one episode and leaving the second episode unattended.

The last six trials were slow episodes, which meant 20 ball passes or hand slaps. The subsequent trials involved the participants responding to both episodes at once or on one episode only while leaving the other unattended. Neisser and Becklen asked the participants to push the buttons when a significant event happened in the attended episode.

Neisser and Becklen added odd events to the ignored episode during the trials. For example, the players would shake hands or do fake throwing movements until the real ball came into view.

The results showed that subjects can still pay attention to a given episode even in the presence of a superimposed irrelevant episode. Performance dropped drastically when monitoring of the two episodes occurred simultaneously. Those assigned to the binocular view performed better in missing fewer targets. The subjects also rarely noticed the odd event.

With these findings, Neisser and Becklen suggested that selective attention results from visual perception regarding the ability to follow visual events. As shown in the ball game or hand game, they also proposed eye movements are a product of selective attention. Additionally, they rejected the idea of some filter blocking irrelevant information (unattended episodes) from entering the visual processes.

An illustration of selective focus, pexels.com

Ulrich Neisser: Contribution to Psychology

Known as the “father of cognitive psychology,” Ulrich Neisser sparked a cognitive movement with the publication of his first book, Cognitive Psychology, in 1967. Neisser's work challenged behaviorism and widened the cognitive approach, uniting researchers in the discipline and helping to develop cognitive psychology.

Ulric Neisser's support for understanding human nature prompted him to go beyond theories and laboratory studies. He also pushed for ecological cognitive research, coming from his discontent with cognitive research, emphasizing laboratory settings above real-life scenarios.

According to Neisser, cognitive research should not be restricted to the laboratory but rather find application in real-world contexts where we can use our memory, perception, attention, and other mental processes. More than just laboratory findings, he sought to show that cognitive psychology makes a difference concerning significant issues.

John Dean, commons.wikimedia.org

Neisser's ecologically focused research helped broaden cognitive psychology by increasing the need for more research and other methodologies and questions. An example is his case study of John Dean's Watergate testimony, for which he found that it differs from what was recorded.

Neisser developed the concept of “repisodic” memory from this, which refers to memories that, we believe, are a reproduction of the past but actually represent repeated experiences. In other words, Neisser describes human memory as a product of active reconstruction and not merely a reproduced product in its exact form.

Furthermore, Neisser's publications drew attention to the cognitive self and issues in IQ testing, for which he led an American Psychological Association Task Force on intelligence in the 1990s.

Ulrich Neisser Definition Cognitive Psychology

Ulric Neisser introduced a new way of studying the mind. In his book Cognitive Psychology, Neisser defined this discipline as the study of constructive cognitive processes, which includes how stimulus information is processed, analyzed, stored, and utilized. Neisser thought that the increasing power of computers could make the measurement of cognitive mechanisms easier. In his view of cognitive psychology, he also stressed the ideas of information and constructive processing. He believes cognition is essential to what a person can do. He put forward these ideas in response to the dominant school in psychology at the time, which is behaviorism.

Ulrich Neisser: Theory

Ulrich Neisser also looked into perception and put together his ideas, which he called the “perceptual cycle.” James Gibson's ecological theory mainly influenced him that perception is direct, which says that we can understand what we see without having to interpret it because there is enough information in our environment.

Illustration of perceptual cycle, StudySmarter Original

The Perceptual Cycle

The idea of this theory is that perception is a cycle, where activation of schemata through perceptual information directs our attention and activity in pursuit of further information.

Neisser defined schemata as an internal knowledge framework that is part of the perceptual cycle but actively accepts information about what is observed. The schema also leads to perceptual inquiry, allowing new information to be perceived, which modifies them.

To illustrate this further, let's look at the main principles of the perceptual cycle:

Perception is a building process that goes on all the time.

According to Neisser, we anticipate as we take in information, guided by our schema and accessible information. What we see motivates us to seek more information. As we explore and accept input, our schema is updated, leading us to engage in further perceptual inquiry and acceptance of new information. This ongoing process consists of event anticipation, exploration, and available information.

Illustration of cup game, StudySmarter Original

Perception is the result of how schemata and available information work together.

Neisser states that our schemata vary depending on available information. As mentioned earlier, schemata guide perceptual exploration. Neisser compares the schema to a format, where accessible information in a perceptual cycle can affect the format, shaping how incoming information is absorbed and impacting what is perceived.

Perception also involves the use of cognitive maps.

Neisser says that cognitive maps are a type of schema, but a bigger one that also works with our information and guides our actions. The schema we talked about earlier is just a small part of a whole cognitive map. The schema tells us where to look, and the cognitive map tells us where to go and what to do next.