EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
Ulric (Dick) Neisser passed away on February 17, 2012. Agnes Szokolszky had interviewed him for a book about ecological psychology consisting of interviews with key people. The interviews were done in 1997 and never published. When Eleanor Gibson died in 2002, Szokolszky allowed us to publish her interview with Gibson inEcological Psychology15(4). Given that this unpublished interview existed, we thought it fitting to commemorate Dick by publishing the interview.
—William M. Mace
INTERVIEW
Q.In this interview project I would like to explore how it happened that a scientific movement has been born based on the work of James and Eleanor Gibson. You have been there from the very beginning, so I'm asking you first about those early times when you first met the Gibsons.
A. Well, I came to Cornell in 1967 and when I came I had just finished a book calledCognitive Psychology, which, luckily for me, turned out to be an influential book because I was saying a lot of things that people were wanting to hear around the late sixties. The bookCognitive Psychology, which I had been working on for about two and a half years before coming to Cornell, really emphasized the information processing approach and helped to shape this approach that a lot of people were interested in at that time. I did not know about Jimmy Gibson's new work, or I knew rather little about it. I had read Gibson's first bookThe Perceptual and Visual Worldthat came out in 1950. I had read it when I was a graduate student and while I thought it was a good book, it did not seem to me particularly stunning or revolutionary. Although, in retrospect I see now that it was more original than it seemed to be when I was a student. What did I know then? I had met both the Gibsons a couple of times at meetings. One, I think, was at the Psychonomic Society, and we talked a little, but I had not read Gibson's 1966 book,The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. I was coming to Cornell and I had not read that book. In fact, when I wroteCognitive Psychology, I did not even know about that book. That's not too surprising, because Gibson's book was so different from anything that was going on in anybody else's head then, that I wouldn't have known what to do with it if I had read it. Anyway, they hired me here even though I was an information processor; perhaps they saw that there were possibilities. My main job when I was hired was to teach the course in perception. At that time Gibson had some kind of a grant, a lifetime career award, so he did not have to teach. His salary was based on research. Julian Hochberg had been here teaching perception but he had just left to take a job elsewhere and so they needed someone to teach perception. I think that was the slot that I was called upon to fill. When I taught the perception course, I had two teaching assistants—John Kennedy and James Farber. I had the feeling that in some way they were always laughing and that they knew something I didn't know but I didn't quite know what it was.
Q.Farber was Gibson's graduate student, wasn't he?
A. Both Farber and Kennedy were Gibson's graduate students. And Kennedy has continued to work in related areas ever since that time. I taught a fairly conventional course in perception at that time. I can't remember the book I used but it was on information processing and the rest of it.
At that time both Gibsons had the laboratory at the airport. To understand that, you have to realize that the psychology department here at Cornell was housed in a classic old building, where it had been housed since Titchener's time and there just wasn't a whole lot of room in that building for laboratories. So they [the Gibsons] managed to persuade the university to rent them space in an old building near the airport which is about ten minutes drive from here. There they had very exciting ongoing research programs. In addition to Farber and Kennedy, Al Yonas was there and others as well. I can't list all the names, but a lot of very interesting people were there. I started to hang out there for hours on end. I had conversations with Jimmy in which he would maintain that information was in the light and that perception was direct and the rest of those things. On the first account of these views I really thought he was going crazy. Then, after a while, I began to regard them as platitudes—you know, when one is looking at a view that one doesn't share, one swims very easily from the position that it's foolish to that it's obvious, basically two main defenses we have against positions that are not our own. That went on for several years.
FIGURE 1 Ulrich Neisser (right) with Jacob Beck. Ecological Optics conference, Cornell University, 1970. Courtesy of Sverker Runeson.
We were good friends with the Gibsons. My wife and I played bridge with them, and we saw them often. Jimmy was of course a wonderful person to have at a party or anywhere social, he would just lighten up any room that he came into, got you drinks, told jokes, he was a great guy. We were really good friends and we talked psychology, but not all the time.
Q.Actually, what made you change your position about his views?
A. Well I kept thinking about it and I read his earlier book,The Senses Considered. A couple of years after I got here, I forget just what year it was [1970 ed.], but there was the meeting on ecological optics that a lot of people at that time came to. David Lee and Julian Hochberg came (I have a wonderful picture somewhere here [seeFigures 1–3], I'll try to find for you later, that was taken at the Ecological Optics Congress) and I listened to all that stuff and it made quite an impression on me. After a while I began to think to myself that Gibson is right. Information is in the light. It has to be in the light. How can it be elsewhere? Partly I was prepared for this because I was getting discouraged with what had followed the publication of my book, Cognitive Psychology. The book was a great success, it made me famous and influenced the field, but not long before the end of the sixties I was already questioning it very seriously for reasons that had nothing in particular to do with Gibson. Two of the main themes in my book had been information processing on the one hand and this notion that perception was constructive, an active constructive process on the other hand, which at the time I thought I could put together into a general theory of perception and cognition. The information processing part of it really took off and we all began doing reaction time information processing studies. I found them increasingly boring and I found that I wasn't reading them and that I didn't care whether some reaction times were faster than other reaction times in a number of different paradigms. InCognitive Psychology, I tried to make psychology stay relevant to human nature. I addressed a lot of questions that I thought were about human nature, that were about important questions, and here were these people doing one reaction time experiment after another. It was pretty boring. I hadn't intended that. The other thrust of my book had been that perception was constructive, which I thought was a fine and wonderful phrase. It had a certain rhetorical fling to it, but I remember a number of things that made me suspicious of that. Once I got a letter from a psychiatrist saying how right I was and that he was really pleased to see this theoretically, that perception was constructive because he had seen the same things in the hallucinations of his patients. I thought, hmm, I must not have expressed myself correctly. I didn't quite mean that perception was like hallucination! Then there was a very favorable review of my book by a behaviorist in the Skinnerian journal called theJournal of Experimental Analysis of Behaviorand I knew then, too, that I'd done something wrong because if the behaviorists liked it I was making a big mistake. So I had all of these things going around in my head that perhaps I hadn't quite got it right withCognitive Psychology. What was the point of saying perception was constructive if it always constructed exactly the correct thing? That seemed far-fetched. Then, of course I was listening to Gibson and all these ideas were around and so after a while I began, you might say, waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat saying: He's right, what am I going to do now? Gibson is right!
FIGURE 2 Evening relaxation at the Ithaca, New York, home of Ulric Neisser. Counterclockwise: Neisser, John Roberts, Tom Toleno, Bob Shaw, Karin Lindhagen, Jenn Lee, Dave Lee (back to camera). Ecological Optics conference, Cornell University, 1970. Courtesy of Sverker Runeson.
FIGURE 3 James Gibson (left) and Julian Hochberg. Ecological Optics conference, Cornell University, 1970. Courtesy of Sverker Runeson.
Q.Was this conclusion coming to you really like a flash?