Ulric Neisser

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

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

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

His given name originally had an "h" on the end (Ulrich), 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 Richard Gustav Neisser (December 8, 1928 – February 17, 2012) was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, 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.

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

Neisser's father, Hans Neisser, was a distinguished Jewish economist.

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

They sailed to the United States on the ocean liner Hamburg, arriving in New York on September 15, 1933.

As he grew, Neisser sought to fit in and succeed in America.

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

Neisser's attraction to baseball alerted him to an idea that he would later call a "flashbulb memory".

Neisser attended Harvard University in the late 1940s, graduating in 1950 with a summa cum laude in psychology.

He subsequently entered the master's program at Swarthmore College.

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

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, Neisser ended up working with Kohler's less well-known colleague, Hans Wallach.

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

Selfridge and Neisser invented the "pandemonium model of pattern recognition, which they described in a Scientific American article in 1950."

After working with Selfridge, Neisser received multiple grants for research involving thinking, which contributed ultimately to his best-known book "Cognitive Psychology"''.

Neisser completed his master's degree at Swarthmore in 1952.

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.

He 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.

According to Cutting, Neisser felt a "deep sympathy for the idealistic humanism" of Abraham Maslow, and Maslow had also been deeply interested in Gestalt psychology.

After a time at Emory University and the University of Pennsylvania, Neiser finally established himself at Cornell, where he spent the remainder of his academic career.

While at Harvard Neisser became friends with Oliver Selfridge, a young computer scientist at MIT's Lincoln Laboratories.

Selfridge had been an early advocate of machine intelligence.

and Neisser served as a part-time consultant in Selfridge's lab.

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 ("ecologically valid") 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.

The rapidly developing field of cognitive psychology received a major boost from the publication in 1967 of the first, and most influential, of Neisser's books: Cognitive Psychology.

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

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Neisser as the 32nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.