Ulric Neisser, Biography Of The Father Of Cognitive Psychology

Ulric Neisser is known or recognized as the father of cognitive psychology, an approach that studies the mental processes involved in knowledge. In the 2002 Review of General Psychology , a general survey that is conducted periodically, it ranked 32nd among the most cited psychologists of the 20th century.

Ulric Neisser dedicated most of his life to the study of memory, without neglecting other mental processes. His contributions in this field have been very relevant. Several of his postulates in this regard are still valid in current psychology.

This psychologist and researcher started from the principles of Gestalt, but then went his own way. The book devoted his ideas and took him to fame was Cognitive Psychology or Cognitive Psychology , published in 1967. Interestingly, despite being the founder of cognitive psychology, also made a strong criticism in his work Cognition and Reality , 1976.

Ulric Neisser, origins

Ulric Neisser was born in Kiel (Germany) on December 8, 1828. His father was Hans Neisser, a brilliant and prosperous economist who anticipated Hitler’s escalation in Europe and anticipated his plans, emigrating to England and then to the United States. United in 1933.

The mother was Charlotte Neisser, a sociologist very active in the German women’s movement. She was a Catholic, but converted to Judaism upon marriage. He had two children: Ulric and Marianne, the latter four years older than him. They all went to live in the United States, staying permanently there.

The family fit in perfectly with the adopted society, although there was always some taboo surrounding their German origin. The father became very fond of baseball and this is said to have influenced his son Ulric’s interests as well. He was described as a plump little boy with good spirits and practical intelligence.

The formation of Ulric Neisser

Ulric Neisser trained as a psychologist at Harvard University. He graduated with highest honors in 1950. He had inherited a passion for baseball from his father; although above his passion, he did not show great aptitudes for this sport. He once said that it had made him interested in Gestalt, which in its day was the least prominent school of psychology.

Neisser earned his master’s degree in 1952 from Swarthmore College , a Gestalt temple. He then got his doctorate from Harvard in 1956, with a thesis in an unusual field: psychophysics. He then worked as a professor at the same university for a year and later in other academic centers, finally settling at Cornell.

During those years, important figures in psychology such as George A. Miller, Hans Wallach and Abraham Maslow had great influence on him. He also met a young computer scientist named Oliver Selfridge, who was decisive for him, as he introduced him to the subject of artificial intelligence. Later he went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote his masterpiece.

The contributions of Ulric Neisser

Ulric Neisser’s greatest contributions were in the field of memory understanding. He postulated and tested a concept that continues to this day: human memory is a reconstruction of events and not a snapshot of what happens. In that sense, memory is creative, unlike machines. It takes the memories and reworks them, rather than reproducing them with extreme fidelity.

Neisser also coined the concept of episodic memory, which is related to autobiographical memories. This, together with semantic memory, make up declarative memory. This is also known as explicit memory and it is what allows to evoke specific events, in contrast to procedural memory, in which ways of doing are remembered.

To elaborate his theories, Ulric Neisser always used experimental cases or studies. The concept of episodic memory was developed from the analysis of his conversations with John Dean, Richard Nixon’s assistant, about Watergate .

His studies of people’s memories of the 1986 California earthquake and the catastrophic Challenger space shuttle were famous.

He died on February 17, 2012, in New York, due to Parkinson’s disease. Ulric Neisser gave shape and body to cognitive psychology, one of the great pillars of psychology today.