[4] Bruner published his first article on a psychological subject in 1939, examining the effect of thymus extract on the sexual behavior of the female rat.

[13] As an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, Bruner studied the effects of psychological factors on legal practice.

[6][16] Bruner is one of the pioneers of cognitive psychology in the United States, which began through his own early research on sensation and perception as being active, rather than passive processes.

[18] These series of experiments issued in what some called the 'New Look' psychology, which challenged psychologists to study not just an organism's response to a stimulus, but also its internal interpretation.

After a time, Bruner began to research other topics in psychology, but in 1990 he returned to the subject and gave a series of lectures, later compiled into the book Acts of Meaning.

He coined the term "scaffolding" to describe an instructional process in which the instructor provides carefully programmed guidance, reducing the amount of assistance as the student progresses through task learning.

Bruner's learning theory suggests that it is efficacious, when faced with new material, to follow a progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic representation; this holds true even for adult learners.

Each successively higher level of categories becomes more specific, echoing Benjamin Bloom's understanding of knowledge acquisition as well as the related idea of instructional scaffolding.

In accordance with this understanding of learning, Bruner proposed the spiral curriculum, a teaching approach in which each subject or skill area is revisited at intervals, at a more sophisticated level each time.

From 1964 to 1996 Bruner sought to develop a complete curriculum for the educational system that would meet the needs of students in three main areas which he called Man: A Course of Study.

[20] Bruner was deeply impressed by his 1995 visit to the preschools of Reggio Emilia and has established a collaborative relationship with them to improve educational systems internationally.

At Oxford Bruner worked with a large group of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows to understand how young children manage to crack the linguistic code, among them Alison Garton, Alison Gopnik, Magda Kalmar (Kalmár Magda), Alan Leslie, Andrew Meltzoff, Anat Ninio, Roy Pea, Susan Sugarman,[21] Michael Scaife, Marian Sigman,[22] Kathy Sylva and many others.

Much emphasis was placed on employing the then-revolutionary method of videotaped home-observations, Bruner showing the way to a new wave of researchers to get out of the laboratory and take on the complexities of naturally occurring events in a child's life.

This decade of research established Bruner at the helm of the interactionist approach to language development, exploring such themes as the acquisition of communicative intents and the development of their linguistic expression, the interactive context of language use in early childhood, and the role of parental input and scaffolding behavior in the acquisition of linguistic forms.

In 1980, Bruner returned to the United States, taking up the position of professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1981.