Charles Ransom Gallistel (born May 18, 1941) is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University.

He is an expert in the cognitive processes of learning and memory, using animal models to carry out research on these topics.

Gallistel has made experimental and theoretical contributions to several areas of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience: 1) The nature and development of the representation of numerosity in young children, in collaboration with his wife, Rochel Gelman.

His critique, in particular, focuses on how the Associationist theory of mind allegedly cannot explain how the brain encodes quantitative data such as distances, directions, and temporal durations.

Gallistel rather argues that such memories could be collected inside the neurons, at the molecular level, and to support his claim he remarks the considerable capacity of polynucleotides for storing information.