A Brief Biography of Ulric Gustav Neisser

Ulric Gustav Neisser (1928 - 2012) was a German-born, American psychologist. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received worldwide reputation for his work in the development of cognitive science and the shift from behavioral to cognitive approach in psychology with his 1967 book Cognitive Psychology. His work also involves the study of attention, memory, and intelligence. He is 32nd of APA’s 100 eminent psychologists of the 20th century.

An Overview

Neisser was born into a Jewish family December 8, 1928. At the age of 5, to escape the persecution of German Nazi, his family moved to Pennslvania and settled in Swarthmore upon his father’s appointment at Wharton Business School. He enrolled in Harvard University in 1946 to first physics, but discovered his passion towards Gestaltist view of psychology against behaviorism after two years. Not long after graduating from Harvard, he went to Swarthmore College for his master’s degree, where he worked with Wolfgang Köhler, Hans Wallach, and Henry Gleitman. After he received his master’s degree in 1952, realized the future of psychology was in Gestaltism. He returned to Harvard for graduate school and received his doctorate in 1956.

Neisser worked briefly at Harvard and Brandeis, where he was influenced by Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology. His book Cognitive Psychology was written at the University of Pennsylvania and published in 1967. Neisser was hired by the Gibsons to work as a full professor at Cornell University shortly after this publication. Influenced by James Gibson’s theory on perception, he reevaluated his initial themes in Cognitive Psychology and supplemented his 1976 book Cognition and Reality with re...

... middle of paper ...

...most about Ulric Neisser was his elasticity to keep an dispassionate and open mind towards his own works and his art of maintaining academic independence and collaboration with his colleagues. As he acknowledged in the interview with Szokolszky (2013), not long after his success with his Cognitive Psychology, he grew speculative of his description of the constructive process of perception. As mentioned above, Neisser’s model of information processing starts from retinal image, while in Gibson’s model, it starts from the ambient light reflected from the object. He embraced Gibson’s model and justified its superiority over his. Sometimes we focus too much on defending our own opinion, but such overprotection often comes with the negligence of valuable ideas from others. Neisser and Gibson’s relationship is a perfect example of academic independence and collaboration.