Cognitive Psychology: Ulric Neisser

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: ULRIC NEISSER (Lecture Series-2), B.A. IInd (Honors) (Paper-IVth Systems in Psychology) By Dr. Masaud Ansari Department of Psychology, A.P.S.M. College, Barauni L. N. M. University, Darbhanga 16th OCTOBER 2020 Cognitive Psychology: Ulric Neisser (1928-2012) Born in Kiel, Germany, Ulric Neisser was brought to the United States by his parents at the age of three. Describing his childhood, Neisser wrote, “I was afraid of girls, poor at sports, and incompetent even in shop. I thought of myself as an outsider and of my few friends as weird (creepy). Maybe I was weird, too” (2007, p.272). He began his college studies at Harvard, majoring in physics. Impressed with a young psychology professor by the name of George Miller, Neisser decided that physics did not excite him. He switched to psychology and took an honors course with Miller on the psychology of communications and information theory. He reports also being influenced by Koffka’s book, Principles of Gestalt Psychology. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1950, Neisser earned his master’s degree at Ulric Neisser (1928-2012) Swarthmore College, studying under Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. Neisser returned to Harvard for his Ph.D., which he completed in 1956. Conti… Despite his growing attraction to a cognitive approach to psychology, Neisser saw no escape from behaviorism if he wanted an academic career. “It was what you had to learn. That was the age when it was supposed that no psychological phenomenon was real unless you could demonstrate it in a rat (quoted in Baars, 1986, p. 275)”. It was fortunate for Neisser that his first academic job was at Brandeis University, where the psychology department chair was Abraham Maslow. At the time, Maslow was moving away from his own behaviorist training to develop the humanistic approach to the field. Maslow was not successful in turning Neisser into a humanistic psychologist, or in turning humanistic psychology into psychology’s third force, but he provided the opportunity for Neisser to pursue his interest in cognitive issues. (Neisser later claimed that cognitive psychology, not humanistic psychology, was the third force.) Conti… In 1967 Neisser published Cognitive Psychology. He reported that the book was a personal one, an attempt to define himself and the kind of psychologist he wanted to be. The book was also a landmark in the history of psychology, an attempt to define a new approach to the field. It became extremely popular, and Neisser was embarrassed to find himself designated the “father” of cognitive psychology. “In the blink of an eye,” Neisser wrote 40 years later, “there were cognitive journals, courses on cognition, training programs in cognitive psychology, and conferences of every kind. I myself was a star, now introduced everywhere as ‘the father of cognitive psychology.’ It was a heady experience for a young man not yet 40 years old” (2007, p. 284). Conti… But he soon grew disillusioned (disappointed) with what he had created. Just nine years later, Neisser published Cognition and Reality (1976), which expressed his deepening dissatisfaction with what he saw as the narrowing of the cognitive position and its reliance on laboratory situations instead of real-world settings from which to collect data. He insisted that the results of psychological research should have ecological (environmental) validity. By that he meant that they should be generalizable to situations beyond the confines of the laboratory. In addition, Neisser insisted that cognitive psychologists should be able to apply their findings to practical problems, helping people deal with the everyday issues in their work and in their lives. Thus, Neisser concluded that the cognitive psychology movement had little to contribute to psychology’s understanding of how people cope. And so this major figure in the founding of cognitive psychology became an outspoken critic, challenging the movement as he had earlier challenged behaviorism. Research on memory Neisser was an early exponent (promotor) of one of a key conceptualizations of memory, the view, now widely accepted, that memory represents an active process of construction rather than a passive reproduction of the past. This notion arose from Neisser's analysis of the Watergate testimony of John Dean, a former advisor to Richard Nixon. The study compares Dean's memories, gleaned (gathered) from his direct testimony, to recorded conversations in which Dean participated. Neisser found that Dean's memories were largely incorrect when compared to the recorded conversations. For one thing, he found that Dean's memories tended to be egocentric, selecting items that emphasized his role in ongoing events. More importantly, Dean combined into single "memories" a combination of events that actually occurred at different times. As Neisser states, "what seems to be a remembered episode actually represents a repeated series of events". Neisser suggested that such memory errors are common, reflecting the nature of memory as a process of construction. Artificial Intelligence Cognitive psychologists accepted computers as a model for human cognitive functioning, suggesting that the machines display artificial intelligence and process information similarly to the way people do. Initially computer scientists and cognitive psychologists enthusiastically embraced the notion of artificial intelligence. As early as 1949, when computers were relatively primitive, the author of a book titled Giant Brains declared, “a machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think” (quoted in Dyson, 1997, p. 108). In 1950 the British computer genius Alan Turing (1912–1954) proposed a way to examine the proposition that computers can think. Called the Turing Test, it involved persuading a subject that the computer with which he or she is communicating is really another person, not a machine. If the subject cannot distinguish the computer’s responses from human responses, then the computer must be displaying intelligence at a human level. .

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