37 Facts About Ulric Neisser

Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Ulric Neisser has been referred to as the "father of cognitive psychology".

Ulric Neisser posited that a person's mental processes could be measured and subsequently analyzed.

In 1967, Neisser published Cognitive Psychology, which he later said was considered an attack on behaviorist psychological paradigms.

Ulric Neisser postulated that memory is, largely, reconstructed and not a snap shot of the moment.

Ulric Neisser illustrated this during one of his highly publicized studies on people's memories of the Challenger explosion.

Ulric Gustav Neisser was born in Kiel, Germany, on December 8,1928.

In 1923 he married Ulric Neisser's mother, Charlotte, who was a lapsed Catholic active in women's movement in Germany and had a degree in sociology.

Ulric Neisser had an older sister, Marianne, who was born in 1924.

Ulric Neisser was a chubby child tagged early on with the nickname with "Der kleine Dickie", later reduced to "Dick".

Ulric Neisser's given name originally had an "h" on the end, but he believed that it was too German and most of his friends could not properly pronounce it, so he eventually dropped the "h".

Ulric Neisser's father foresaw Hitler's coming militarism and left Germany for England in 1933, followed a few months later by his family.

Ulric Neisser took a particular interest in baseball, which is thought to have played an "indirect but important role in [his] psychological interests".

Ulric Neisser subsequently entered the master's program at Swarthmore College.

Ulric Neisser wanted to attend Swarthmore College because that was where Wolfgang Kohler, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, was a faculty member.

Ulric Neisser has said that he had always been sympathetic to underdogs, due to boyhood experiences such as being picked last for a baseball team, and that this might have drawn him to Gestalt psychology, which was an underdog school of psychology at the time.

At Swarthmore, instead of working with Wolfgang Kohler, Ulric Neisser ended up working with Kohler's less well-known colleague, Hans Wallach.

Ulric Neisser met and became friends with a new assistant professor, Henry Gleitman, who later became well known in his own right.

Ulric 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.

Ulric Neisser subsequently spent a year as an instructor at Harvard, moving on to Brandeis University, where his intellectual horizon was expanded through contact with department chair Abraham Maslow.

Selfridge had been an early advocate of machine intelligence, and Ulric Neisser served as a part-time consultant in Selfridge's lab.

However, over the next decade Ulric Neisser developed qualms about where cognitive psychology was headed.

In 1976, Ulric Neisser wrote Cognition and Reality, in which he expressed three general criticisms of the field.

Ulric Neisser 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.

Ulric Neisser felt that cognitive psychology suffered a severe disconnect between theories of behavior tested by laboratory experimentation, on the one hand, and real-world behavior, on the other, a disconnect which he called a lack of ecological validity.

Ulric Neisser was an early exponent of one of the key conceptualizations of memory, namely, the view, now widely accepted, that memory represents an active process of construction rather than a passive reproduction of the past.

Ulric Neisser found that Dean's memories were largely incorrect when compared to the recorded conversations.

Ulric Neisser suggested that such memory errors are common, reflecting the nature of memory as a process of construction.

Ulric Neisser sought to analyse this conception of memory by undertaking a study of individual's memories of the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion.

Immediately following the Challenger explosion in January 1986, Ulric Neisser distributed a questionnaire to college freshmen asking them to write down key information as to where they were, who they were with, and what time it was, when the Challenger explosion occurred.

Three years later, Ulric Neisser surveyed the now senior students using the same survey to examine the accuracy of their memory.

Ulric Neisser found that there were notable errors in the student memories, despite the student's confidence in their accuracy.

Ulric Neisser's findings challenged the idea that flashbulb memories are virtually without error.

Ulric Neisser conducted further research on flashbulb memories, aiming to clarify the manner in which memories are constructed.

Ulric Neisser used surveys to collect data on the emotional impact of the earthquake and on individual memories of the earthquake to study possible associations between memory and emotion.

Ulric Neisser found that, in comparison to participants in Atlanta, the California students generally had more accurate recollections of the earthquake.

Ulric Neisser died due to Parkinson's disease on February 17,2012, in Ithaca, New York.