Neisser Is Dead at 83; Reshaped Study of the Mind
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: February 25, 2012
Ulric Neisser, a psychological researcher who helped lead a post war revolution in the study of the human mind by advancing the understanding of mental processes like perception and memory, died on Feb. 17 in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 83.
2012,二月17日,伊萨卡
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son Mark said.
死于帕金森综合症
Advances in information theory, computers and experimental methods after World War II enabled scientists to challenge the dominant psychological discipline, behaviorism. Behaviorism examines stimuli to the senses and the resulting responses. In its purest permutation, it rejects the idea that the mind even exists.
Dr. Neisser (pronounced NICE-er), who loved to challenge orthodoxy and devise theoretical frameworks, sought to prove that people could think and to describe how they did it. He even named the new field with the title of his 1967 book, “Cognitive Psychology.” It set forth ideas advanced by him and other scientists that internal mental processes not only mattered, but could also be studied and measured.
“He galvanized this whole discipline,” James E. Cutting, chairman of the psychology department of Cornell University, said in an interview.
As computer technology advanced in the 1960s, students of the mind began to imagine it as an information processing system. Work in information theory, growing out of code-breaking operations in World War II, fed into the new discipline. So did new theories of linguistics that posited an innate structure to the mind.
James R. Pomerantz, a psychology professor at Rice University, said in an interview that Dr. Neisser’s genius was to combine these new understandings in constructing a new view of the mind, much as a paleontologist assembles a dinosaur skeleton from scattered fossils. The result, Dr. Pomerantz said, was “a single coherent way of thinking how the mind works.”
Dr. Neisser’s work showed that memory is a reconstruction of the past, not an accurate snapshot of it. He found that however much people think they are remembering actual events, they are really remembering memories — and probably memories of memories. The mind, he said, conflates things.
In a much-publicized experiment the day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, Dr. Neisser asked students to write down their immediate experience upon hearing the news. Nearly three years later, he asked them to recount it. A quarter of the accounts were strikingly different, half were somewhat different, and less than a tenth had all the details correct. All were confident that their latter accounts were completely accurate.
Another memory experiment compared the testimony of John W. Dean III, the former aide to President Richard M. Nixon, during the Senate Watergate hearings with tapes of Mr. Dean’s conversations that the president had secretly recorded. He found discrepancies in detail after detail.
But Dr. Neisser said the testimony was accurate about the most important truths: that there really had been a cover-up, and that Nixon did approve it.
He also made observations about perception. In one experiment, he had participants watch groups throwing balls on a video screen. As they watched, a woman walked through the room carrying an open umbrella. Few remembered seeing her. Dr. Neisser called this phenomenon “selective looking”; other psychologists christened it “inattentional blindness.”
One result of this work on perception and memory was to cast doubt on accounts of remembered child abuse that swept the United States in the early 1980s. Dr. Neisser called into question the widely held view that extremely vivid memories cannot be false. He worked with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and served on its board.
In 1995, Dr. Neisser headed an American Psychological Association task force that examined research suggesting that intelligence varied among ethnic groups. The panel ended up questioning the tests themselves, or, in his phrase, the assumption that “there’s something wrong with children who score low on intelligence tests.”
“Once you make that assumption,” he said, “all your later theory and research suffers from a built-in bias. To ask what’s wrong with black children is to assume that something is the matter — to locate the problem in the mind of the child.”