Ulric Neisser

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addressed these problems with an ingenious parallel-processing model (now justly famous) called Pandemonium. The model was all Oliver's, but it was I who suggested that we write it up for Scientific American (Selfridge & Neisser, 1960). Although machine pattern recognition was intriguing, human pattern recognition was even more so. How to study it empirically? Reaction time (RT) suggested itself as a method but seemed to have a fatal flaw: each RT includes not only the time needed to recognize the stimulus but also times for planning and executing the required responses. It was to get around that requirement that I devised a new visual search paradigm (Neisser, 1963a.) A subject scanning down a column of letters/numbers has to process each one to determine that it is NOT the target, but makes no selective response until the target itself has been reached. The scan rate (i.e., the slope of the linear function relating the position of the target to the search time) should reflect the time needed to make each of those determinations. This paradigm was an early and unsophisticated version of what would soon become known as "mental chronometry." In later studies, including several done with graduate students at Brandeis, I used it to explore other issues. The most surprising result (Neisser et al, 1963) was that well-practiced subjects can search as rapidly for any of ten targets (e.g., for a, f, h, k, m, p, u, z, 9, or 4) as for one. I took this initially counter-intuitive result as clear evidence for parallel processing in pattern recognition. The multiplicity of thought During all this time, I was profoundly ambivalent about minds and computers. On the one hand computation and programming were obviously a rich source of ideas about mental processes - a source that I was using freely myself. On the other hand my most basic intuitions - stemming from Gestalt psychology, humanistic thinking, and everywhere else - were offended by the suggestion that minds and brains are nothing but computers. Two 1963 papers reflected this ambivalence. In "The Multiplicity of Thought" (1963b), I used the contrast between parallel and serial processing to clarify familiar distinctions in the literature on thinking and problem solving: creativity vs. constraint, intuition vs. reason, productive thinking vs. blind repetition, autistic vs. realistic thinking, primary vs. secondary process. In "The Imitation of Man by Machine" (1963c) however, I listed three fundamental ways in which computer processing differs from human thinking: it does not undergo a natural course of development, is not driven by feelings and emotions, and typically addresses a multiplicity of motives at once. One of my teaching responsibilities at Brandeis during this time was a course on memory. Because the standard list-learning research was rather boring, I focused on topics such as Bartlett's notion of memory schemata and Schachtel's theory of infantile amnesia. It was to those ideas that I turned when Tom Gladwin, an anthropologist I knew slightly, invited me to address the Anthropological Society of Washington. The resulting paper, "Cultural and cognitive discontinuity" (Neisser, 1962), became a frequently cited contribution to the literature on infantile amnesia. My interest in these issues continued for more than thirty years, and eventually led to a new way of measuring the offset of that amnesia itself (cf. Usher & Neisser, 1993). Cognitive Psychology Sometime in the early '60s, all this began to jell. Perception, the span of attention, visual search, computer pattern recognition, human pattern recognition, problem solving and remembering were all interrelated aspects of information processing. Perception and pattern recognition were input, remembering was output, everything in between was one or another kind 8
of processing. This was already a rather obvious idea (cf. Broadbent, 1958), but no one had put it forward clearly and effectively. I could write a book! The sensible time to write that book would be on my upcoming sabbatical, which was scheduled to begin in the spring of 1965. But where? I was in luck: my friend Martin Orne was just then moving his grant-supported hypnosis laboratory, the "Unit for Experimental Psychiatry," from the Boston Psychopathic Hospital to the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He offered to provide me with an office there for as long as I liked, an offer that I accepted happily. For financial support, I applied for and received a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. Meanwhile, my domestic life had unraveled completely.Anna and I were divorced in early 1964; I moved out of the house in Lincoln and into a two-room apartment in Somerville. I also began a relationship with Arden Seidler, who had three children of her own. These personal developments made me eager to leave the greater Boston area: it was time to start a new life. Arden and I were married - this time a real wedding - on New Year's Eve of 1964. A few weeks later we moved to Bala Cynwyd, a Philadelphia suburb. Arden's three children lived with us; my four children lived with Anna, who soon moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I visited them often. In the upshot I stayed at the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry for 2 1/2 years; that's how long it took to write Cognitive Psychology. Martin Orne was helpful and generous in every possible way, as was Emily Carota Orne, his wife and collaborator who was then completing a Ph.D. in psychology at Brandeis. My stay at the Unit also gave me an opportunity to learn a bit about hypnosis, which turned out to be useful at several points in the book. I was also offered an adjunct position at the University of Pennsylvania, which provided a pleasant opportunity to teach a seminar in collaboration with my old friend and mentor Henry Gleitman. When the Carnegie grant ran out, I applied for and received an NIMH Fellowship. In short, the enterprise that became Cognitive Psychology (1967) was supported in every possible way. The primary goal of the enterprise was to bring together what was known about a wide range of phenomena: "The term 'cognition' refers to all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored recovered, and used" (p.4). After an introduction that made this goal explicit, ten chapters gave detailed and often technical accounts of the state of the art: five chapters on visual cognition, four on audition and language, one on memory and thought. At the theoretical level the argument relied heavily on the notion of "construction": perception was a constructive process, speech perception depended on analysis-by-synthesis, remembering was always constructive, etc. The general tone was positive: instead of attacking behaviorism I simply ignored its assumptions. "Cognitive processes surely exist, so it can hardly be unscientific to study them" (p.5). This upbeat attitude may have been one reason why the book became so popular. Cognitive Psychology legitimized and interconnected a wide range of research paradigms, bringing them together by giving them a name. Many psychologists found themselves in a position like that of Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, who suddenly discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life! Most of them were pleased by the discovery, and "cognitive psychology" soon became an indispensable rubric. In the blink of an eye there were cognitive journals, courses on cognition, training programs in cognitive psychology, cognitive conferences of every kind. I myself was a star, now introduced everywhere as "the father of cognitive psychology." It was a heady experience for a young man not yet 40 years old, and its effect on me was to create something like an illusion of omnipotence. If I had changed 9
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Ulric Neisser

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