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 Review of General Psychology In 2002, a general survey conducted periodically, he 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 that field have been very relevant. Several of his postulates in this regard continue to be valid in current psychology.

This psychologist and researcher started from the principles of Gestalt, but then set out on his own path. The book that consecrated his ideas and brought him to fame was Cognitive Psychologyeither Cognitive psychologypublished in 1967. Curiously, and despite being the founder of cognitive psychology, he also made a strong criticism of it in his work Cognition and Realityfrom 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 rise 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 women’s movement in Germany. She was Catholic, but she converted to Judaism upon marriage. She had two children: Ulric and Marianne, the latter four years older than him. They all went to live in the United States, staying there permanently..

The family fit perfectly into the adopted society, although there was always some taboo around their German origin. The father became very fond of baseball and it is said that this also influenced the interests of his son Ulric. He was described as a small, chubby boy, with good spirits and practical intelligence.

The training of Ulric Neisser

Ulric Neisser trained as a psychologist at Harvard University. He graduated with highest honors in 1950. He had inherited his father’s passion for baseball; Although beyond his passion, he did not demonstrate great aptitude for this sport. He once said that this had made him interested in Gestalt, which in his time was the least prominent school of psychology.

Neisser earned his master’s degree in 1952 at the Swarthmore College, a Gestalt temple. After he earned 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 a 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 topic 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 understanding memory. He postulated and tested a concept that remains valid 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 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, makes up declarative memory. This is also known as explicit memory and is what allows us to evoke specific events, in contrast to procedural memory, in which ways of doing things are remembered.

To develop his theories, Ulric Neisser always used cases or experimental studies. He developed the concept of episodic memory based on the analysis of his conversations with John Dean, Richard Nixon’s assistant, about the Watergate.

His studies of people’s memories of the 1986 California earthquake and the Challenger space shuttle incident 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 current psychology.

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