Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser (December 8, 1928 – February 17, 2012) was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
[3] A main theme in Cognition and Reality is Neisser's advocacy for experiments on perception occurring in natural ("ecologically valid") settings.
In his later career, he summed up current research on human intelligence and edited the first major scholarly monograph on the Flynn effect.
In 1923 he married Neisser's mother, Charlotte ("Lotte"), who was a lapsed Catholic active in women's movement in Germany and had a degree in sociology.
[5] Neisser's father foresaw Hitler's coming militarism and left Germany for England in 1933, followed a few months later by his family.
Neisser wanted to attend Swarthmore College because that was where Wolfgang Kohler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, was a faculty member.
[8] Neisser went on to obtain a doctorate in experimental psychology from Harvard's Department of Social Relations in 1956, completing a dissertation in the sub-field of psychophysics.
[6] He subsequently spent a year as an instructor at Harvard,[8] moving on to Brandeis University, where his intellectual horizon was expanded through contact with department chair Abraham Maslow.
[7] While at Harvard Neisser became friends with Oliver Selfridge, a young computer scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratories.
"[6] After working with Selfridge, Neisser received multiple grants for research involving thinking, which contributed ultimately to his best-known book "Cognitive Psychology".
He placed blame for this failure largely on the excessive reliance on the artificial laboratory tasks that had become endemic to cognitive psychology by the mid-1970s.
Neisser had come to the conclusion that cognitive psychology had little hope of achieving its potential without taking careful note of the Gibsons' view that human behavior may only be understood by starting with an analysis of the information directly available to any perceiving organism.
This view has obvious implications for the reliability of such things as eye-witness testimony, and Neisser later became a board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.
This notion arose from Neisser's analysis of the Watergate testimony of John Dean, a former advisor to Richard Nixon.
For one thing, he found that Dean's memories tended to be egocentric, selecting items that emphasized his role in ongoing events.
Using subjects in California, near the quake, and others in Atlanta, far from it, Neisser examined differences in the recollections of those who actually that experienced the event and those who simply heard about it.