Ulric Neisser (born 8 December 1928) is an American psychologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a faculty member at Cornell University. In 1995, he headed an American Psychological Association task force that reviewed The Bell Curve and related controversies in the study of intelligence. The task force produced the report "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns". In April 1996, he chaired a conference at Emory University that focused on secular changes in intelligence-test scores.[1]
Neisser is a former Guggenheim and Sloan Fellow.[1]
Born in Kiel, Germany, he moved with his family to the United States in 1931. Neisser earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1950, a Master’s at Swarthmore College, and a doctorate from Harvard in 1956. He then taught at Brandeis, Cornell, and Emory universities.
The modern growth of cognitive psychology received a major boost from the publication in 1967 of the first, and most influential, of his books: Cognitive Psychology.
In 1976, he wrote Cognition and Reality, in which he expressed three general criticisms of the field of cognitive psychology. First, he was dissatisfied with the linear programming model of cognitive psychology, with its over-emphasis on peculiar information processing models used to describe and explain behavior. Second, he felt that cognitive psychology had failed to address the everyday aspects and functions of human behavior. He placed blame for this failure largely on the excessive reliance on artificial laboratory tasks that had become endemic to cognitive psychology by the mid-1970s. In this sense, he felt that cognitive psychology suffered a severe disconnect between theories of behavior tested by laboratory experimentation and real-world behavior, which he called a lack of ecological validity. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, he had come to feel a great respect for the theory of direct perception and information pickup that had been promulgated by the preeminent perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson and his wife, the "grand dame" of developmental psychology, Eleanor Gibson. Neisser, in this book, had come to the conclusion that cognitive psychology had little hope of achieving its potential without taking careful theoretical note of the Gibsons' work on perception which argued that understanding human behavior first involves careful analysis of the information available to any perceiving organism.
In 1981, Neisser published John Dean's memory: a case study, in regards to the testimony of John Dean for the Watergate Scandal.
In 1995, Neisser headed an American Psychological Association task force writing a consensus statement on the state of intelligence research, in response to the claims being advanced amid the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve, titled Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns.
In 1998, he published The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures.
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Below is a list of some selected publications by Neisser.