Neisser's Contributions and the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology

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Neisser's Contributions and the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology

Psychology of Personality · Chapter 9: Cognitive Theories of PersonalitySection 9.5 · lesson 57 of 838 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

How the mind got readmitted to psychology, and the warning the field's founder issued about it.

  • Say why Neisser is called the father of cognitive psychology
  • Define cognition as he defined it
  • Explain ecological validity and why he demanded it
  • Name the forces that drove the cognitive revolution

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Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,051 words). Read along, or search it.

Cognitive Theories of Personality

Neisser and the Cognitive Revolution

For about half a century, psychology's official position was that the mind was off limits. Not unimportant. Just not admissible as evidence. This section is about how that changed. It centres on Ulric Neisser, who named the field that replaced behaviorism. And then, remarkably, became one of its sharpest critics. His warning is the most useful thing in this section. A field can win an argument and still study its subject in the wrong place. Neisser thought cognitive psychology was in danger of doing exactly that.

The Pressure

Behaviorism Ran Out of Room

The strict behaviorist rule held for decades. So what eventually broke it? Not a philosophical argument, and not a change of taste. A set of problems the framework could not solve. Behaviorism had real limitations in explaining language. It struggled with complex thought. And a growing body of work on perception, attention and memory had nowhere to sit. A rule about evidence can survive a great deal of criticism. What it cannot survive is a topic it is unable to address. The mid-century shift was driven by what the framework could not reach. More than by what its critics happened to dislike about it.

The Founder

Neisser Names a Field

Ulric Neisser is often called the father of cognitive psychology. His nineteen sixty-seven book, Cognitive Psychology, is the reason. It gave the emerging field its name, and its agenda. Both halves of that sentence are doing work. A name lets scattered work be recognised as one enterprise rather than several. An agenda tells that enterprise what counts as a problem worth solving. Before the book, there was research on perception, on attention, on memory. After it, there was a field, with a shared object of study. That is a real contribution, even though it produced no new experimental finding.

The Definition

What Cognition Was Defined As

Neisser's definition of cognition is worth quoting closely. All the processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. Read that list of verbs again, and notice what it rules out. Transformed. Reduced. Elaborated. Stored. Recovered. Used. Not one of those describes passive reception. The mind in this definition operates on what arrives. It does not simply register it. The definition is also deliberately broad. It gathers perception, attention and memory under one coherent framework. Rather than leaving them as separate specialisms that rarely spoke to each other.

The Achievement

Making Internal Process Respectable Again

The achievement here is easy to state and easy to underrate. Neisser helped establish the study of internal mental processes as a legitimate science. And, crucially, as a rigorous one. That word rigorous is carrying the whole argument. The behaviorist objection was never that the mind is uninteresting. It was that studying it could not be rigorous. So that is the objection this work had to answer. And it was answered by method, rather than by assertion. Which is why the revolution took decades, instead of a single manifesto.

The Turn

Neisser Criticises His Own Field

Here is the turn that makes Neisser worth studying rather than merely citing. He later became a constructive critic of the field he had named. In Cognition and Reality, he argued that laboratory studies risked becoming artificial. And he called for ecological validity. That means the study of cognition as it operates in real, everyday environments. Ecological validity is the extent to which findings apply to real-world settings. His insistence on it remains influential. And it tempers purely mechanical models of the mind. Note who is making this criticism. Not an opponent of cognitive psychology, but the person who defined it.

In Practice

Recall in the Lab and Recall at Work

The concern is concrete, and one example makes it obvious. A memory researcher finds that recall in a quiet lab differs sharply from recall in a busy workplace. The laboratory result is not wrong. It is a real, accurate finding about how memory behaves in a quiet room. The question is whether it holds where memory is actually used. Neisser's call for ecological validity is exactly this concern. And there is an uncomfortable irony in it. The control that makes a laboratory study clean is also what narrows it. Stripping out noise, interruption and stakes removes precisely the conditions. The conditions under which the process normally runs.

The Forces

Three Things Converged

The cognitive revolution was not one event. Several forces converged. First, the limitations of behaviorism in explaining language and complex thought. Second, the rise of the digital computer, as a model of information processing. And third, developments in linguistics and information theory. Together these reopened the mind as a proper object of scientific study. The middle one matters most for what comes next in this chapter. A metaphor arrived that made internal process describable. You could talk about encoding and storage and retrieval without embarrassment. Section nine point six examines that metaphor, and where it breaks down.

The Contrast

Two Views of the Same Organism

Set the two approaches side by side, dimension by dimension. On focus, behaviorism studies observable behavior only. The cognitive approach studies internal processes. On the model of mind, behaviorism treats it as a black box. The cognitive approach treats it as an active information processor. On the key mechanism, behaviorism says reinforcement. The cognitive approach says representation and processing. On the view of the person, behaviorism sees someone shaped by their environment. The cognitive approach sees an interpreter and an agent. And Neisser appears in both columns. He critiqued behaviorism's limits, and he named and defined what replaced it.

For Personality

What the Revolution Made Sayable

For personality theory specifically, the revolution was transformative. And it is worth being precise about how. It legitimized a set of constructs that earlier behaviorism had excluded. Beliefs. Expectancies. Schemas. Self-efficacy. Every construct in this chapter needed the revolution to have happened first. Kelly's constructs, Rotter's locus of control, Bandura's self-efficacy. None of them is admissible under Watson's rule. The revolution also provided a vocabulary. A vocabulary for describing how internal processes generate stable individual differences. Which is precisely what a cognitive theory of personality has to be able to do.

Consolidate

Named, Legitimised, Then Warned

Three steps, in order. Neisser named and organized the field. The nineteen sixty-seven book defined cognition, and gathered perception, attention and memory together. The revolution reopened internal process as legitimate science. Driven by behaviorism's limits, the computer, and work in linguistics and information theory. And then Neisser demanded ecological validity. Study the mind where it actually operates. Not only where it is convenient to observe it. The practical instruction has not changed since. When you model the mind, check that the findings hold in real-world settings.

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About Neisser's Contributions and the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology

Why is Ulric Neisser called the father of cognitive psychology?
Ulric Neisser is called the father of cognitive psychology because his 1967 book, Cognitive Psychology, gave the emerging field its name and agenda. Before it, research on perception, attention, and memory was scattered; afterward it formed one enterprise with a shared object of study. Neisser helped establish internal mental processes as a legitimate and rigorous science, answering the behaviorist claim that the mind could not be studied rigorously.
How did Ulric Neisser define cognition?
Neisser defined cognition as all the processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. None of those verbs describes passive reception, so the mind actively operates on what arrives rather than simply registering it. The definition is deliberately broad, gathering perception, attention, and memory into one coherent framework instead of separate specialties that rarely spoke to each other.
What is ecological validity?
Ecological validity is the extent to which research findings apply to real-world settings. Ulric Neisser called for it in Cognition and Reality (1976), warning that laboratory studies of cognition risked becoming artificial. Recall measured in a quiet lab, for example, may differ sharply from recall in a busy workplace. The lab result is accurate, but the controls that make it clean also remove the conditions in which memory normally operates.
What caused the cognitive revolution in psychology?
The cognitive revolution of the mid-twentieth century came from several converging forces rather than a single event. Behaviorism struggled to explain language and complex thought, the digital computer offered a model of information processing, and linguistics and information theory supplied new tools. Together these reopened the mind to scientific study and legitimized constructs such as beliefs, expectancies, schemas, and self-efficacy that cognitive personality theories depend on.

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Psychology of Personality (Psychology 300) carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
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