Neisser

Ulric "Dick" Neisser, the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Cornell whose pioneering 1967 book "Cognitive Psychology" named and helped launch the cognitive revolution in psychology, died Feb. 17 in Ithaca at age 83 from complications of Parkinson's disease.

Neisser advanced a new way of looking at the human mind. He held that memory, perception and other internal thought processes could be studied and measured, work that was aided by growing computing power. His ideas directly challenged behaviorism, the dominant school in psychology in which Neisser had been trained, which examines responses to external stimuli.

James E. Cutting, chair of the Cornell psychology department, told The New York Times that Neisser "galvanized this whole discipline."

Neisser showed that memory, no matter how certain we are of its accuracy, is often only a partially accurate or sometimes inaccurate reconstruction of past events. During the 1980s, this work called into question the validity of child abuse cases in which evidence consisted of vividly remembered incidents. Neisser served on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

Neisser was born in Kiel, Germany, Dec. 8, 1928, and his family immigrated to the United States in 1933. He earned an undergraduate degree in psychology from Harvard in 1950, a master's degree from Swarthmore College and a doctorate from Harvard in 1956. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He received Guggenheim and Sloan fellowships. He taught at Cornell from 1976 to 1983 and from 1996 until his retirement. From 1983-1996 he taught at Emory University.

In 1995, he chaired an American Psychological Association task force that reviewed "The Bell Curve," a 1994 book on intelligence that made controversial assertions about racial differences in intelligence. In 1976, Neisser wrote "Cognition and Reality," in which he criticized cognitive psychology for excessive reliance on laboratory work rather than real-life situations.

In 1998 Neisser gave the commencement address at the New School for Social Research (now the New School), where he received one of his many honorary degrees. "You are a true rebel but always with a cause," the school's president, Jonathan Fanton, told him. "You challenged the field to abandon the paradigms and theories of behaviorism and explore the complex mental activity lying below the surface of behavior."

He is survived by five children, a stepdaughter, a grandson and a sister. Donations can be made to the Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org) or to a local food bank. A memorial service will be held Saturday, April 14, at 1:30 p.m. in Sage Chapel, followed by a reception in Uris Hall.