Mary Crawford Potter (born 1930) is an American psychologist and emerita professor of cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[1][2][3] After gaining her BA degree in 1952, she attended Radcliffe College for her PhD with Jerry Bruner as her advisor.
She received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 1956 and spent two years at University College London.
She completed her thesis in 1961, and continued as a part-time postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Bruner until 1967.
She was appointed to a full-time position as a lecturer at MIT's department of urban studies and planning and was promoted to associate professor in 1970.
[4][6] In 2017 she received the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists "for her ground-breaking and impactful discoveries about the human mind's ability to rapidly extract meaning from words, images and visual scenes".