Eugene Galanter

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Eugene Galanter

Born 1925
Residence New York, New York, United States
Citizenship United States
Nationality American
Field Psychology, Psychometrics, Psychophysics, Experimental psychology
Institutions Columbia University
Alma mater Swarthmore College, University of Pennsylvania
Notable prizes NASA Distinguished Scientist Research Award

Eugene Galanter (born 1925) is an American academic, experimental psychologist, and author. He is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Psychology of Columbia University. [1]

After serving in the United States Armed Forces in World War II, Galanter graduated with a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1950, after which he entered graduate school in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his M.A. in 1951 and his Ph.D. in 1953. Early in his career, Galanter worked to shift the focus of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychology away from the postwar emphasis on training clinical psychologists and towards the type of experimental psychology, based on sound mathematical models, that would become dominate in the latter half of the 20th century and prefigure the dawn of cognitive psychology in the 1970s.[2]

By 1960, psychology had come to be dominated by behaviorism and learning theory, which emphasized the observable stimulus and response components of human and animal behavior while ignoring the cognitive processes that mediate the relationship between the stimulus and response. The cognitive phenomena occurring within the "black box" between stimulus and response were of little interest to behaviorists, as their mathematical models worked without them. In 1960, the book Plans and the Structure of Behavior, authored by Galanter, George A. Miller, and Karl H. Pribram, was published. In this volume, Galanter and his colleagues sought to unify the behaviorists' learning theory with a cognitive model of learned behavior. Whereas the behaviorists suggested that a simple reflex arc underlies the acquisition of the stimulus-response relationship, Galanter and his colleagues proposed that "some mediating organization of experience is necessary" somewhere between the stimulus and response, in effect a cognitive process which must include monitoring devices that control the acquisition of the stimulus-response relationship. They named this fundamental unit of behavior the T.O.T.E.

Following the publication of Plans and the Structure of Behavior, Galanter, together with Robert Bush and Duncan Luce, worked to move the field of psychology closer to the other natural sciences by utilizing quantifiable variables and measurement to discover law-like rules and relationships which govern human behavior and thought. Galanter, Bush, and Luce, edited the three volumes of the Handbook of Mathematical Psychology and the two volumes of Readings in Mathematical Psychology that both were published in 1963.

After leaving the University of Pennsylvania, Galanter held positions at the University of Washington and Harvard University before becoming the Gelhorn Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, where he was also Director of the Psychophysics Laboratory and, for a time, Chairman of the Department of Psychology. Gallanter published in the areas of psychophysics, psychoeducational assessment, and motivational measurement. While at Columbia, Galanter taught courses on human motivation and political structures and on educational assessment. Galanter has been honored by NASA, which awarded him their Distinguished Scientist Research Award. Galanter is the founder and Chairman of the Board of Children's Progress, Inc., a firm that offers psychoeducational assessment tools to schools and school systems.[3]

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  1. ^ [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/indiv_pages/e_galanter.html Professor Eugene Galanter
  2. ^ [http://www.psych.upenn.edu/history/bushtext.htm History of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
  3. ^ http://www.childrensprogress.com/page1-37.htm Childrens Progress
Persondata
NAME Galanter, Eugene
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SHORT DESCRIPTION
DATE OF BIRTH 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH