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Ulric Neisser Quotes

Ulric Gustav Neisser was a German-born American psychologist and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive psychology". Neisser researched and wrote about perception and memory. He 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. Cognitive Psychology brought Neisser instant fame and recognition in the field of psychology. While Cognitive Psychology was considered unconventional, it was Neisser's Cognition and Reality that contained some of his most controversial ideas. A main theme in Cognition and Reality is Neisser's advocacy for experiments on perception occurring in natural settings. Neisser postulated that memory is, largely, reconstructed and not a snap shot of the moment. Neisser illustrated this during one of his highly publicized studies on people's memories of the Challenger explosion. In his later career, he summed up current research on human intelligence and edited the first major scholarly monograph on the Flynn effect. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Neisser as the 32nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Wikipedia  

✵ 8. December 1928 – 17. February 2012
Ulric Neisser: 10   quotes 2   likes

Famous Ulric Neisser Quotes

“Attention is not a mysterious concentration of psychic energy; it is simply an allotment of analyzing mechanisms to a limited region of the field. To pay attention to a figure is to make certain analyses of, or certain constructions in, the corresponding part of the icon.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 88-89

“Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 4.

“The fact that the span of apprehension averages only four or five… probably results from the high rate of encoding. In a tachistoscopic experiment the subject must read the fading icon as rapidly as possible.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 42 ; As cited in: A.H.C. Van der Heijden, "Visual attention," in: Handbook of Perception and Action, Vol. 3. 1996

“To deal with the whole visual input at once, and make discriminations based on any combination of features in the field, would require too large a brain, or too much "previous experience" to be plausible.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 87

“Paying attention is not just analyzing carefully; rather, it is a constructive act… What we build has only the dimensions we have given it.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 96; As cited in: A.H.C. Van der Heijden (1996)

“The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations. Such terms as sensation. perception. imagery. retention. recall. problem-solving. and thinking. among others. refer to hypothetical stages or aspects of cognition.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 4

Ulric Neisser Quotes

“If we allow several figures to appear at once, the number of possible input configurations is so very large that a wholly parallel mechanism, giving a different output for each of them, is inconceivable.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 94

Appearance

“To cope with this difficulty [of limited capacity], even a mechanical recognition system must have some way to select portions of the incoming information for detailed analysis.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 94

Way

“Cognitive processes surely exist, so it can hardly be unscientific to study them.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 5

Study

“The attentive synthesis of any particular letter or figure takes an appreciable time, of the order of 100ms…If a whole row of letters is to be identified, they must be synthesized one at a time… To "identify" generally means to name, and hence to synthesize not only a visual object but a linguistic-auditory one… Hence the span of apprehension is limited to what can be synthesized, and then verbally stored.”

Ulric Neisser

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 103; As cited in: A.H.C. Van der Heijden (1996)

Time

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