Psychologist-neisser Naiser

The father of cognitive psychology-neisser 2009-03-2 123:3 1 Nesser, an American psychologist born in Germany, is a pioneer of modern cognitive psychology based on information processing theory, and is known as the father of cognitive psychology because of his groundbreaking works.

Nesser (1928——) was born in an intellectual family in Germany and immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of three. 65438-0946, admitted to Harvard University, majored in physics at first, and then changed to psychology under the influence of young professor Miller at that time. 1950 After graduation, he entered Swarthmore College and studied under Professor Kohler, one of the founders of Gestalt Psychology, which undoubtedly had a far-reaching impact on his future research in cognitive psychology. After getting his master's degree, he was not interested in the prevailing behaviorism at that time. He first went to the newly established psychology department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study, but soon found that the research scope of the department was too narrow, so he quickly returned to Harvard University and obtained a doctorate in psychology from 1956. From 65438 to 0957, he started his first teaching job in brandeis University. Although Si Long, then head of the department, had a great influence on him, he did not turn to the humanistic camp. On the contrary, he did a lot of exploration in the field of visual perception at this stage. From 65438 to 0967, he published the book Cognitive Psychology, which is known as the "Bible" in the field of cognitive psychology. This has also become a milestone in the history of psychological development, and he is therefore known as the father of cognitive psychology. Later, he taught in Cornell, Atlanta, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Amway and other universities. His research scope changed from visual perception research, attention, memory, language and self-concept research in his early years to intelligence measurement research in his later years. Nesser never blindly follows the mainstream, but he always leads the trend of psychological research. His contribution to psychology mainly includes the following aspects:

First, the first monograph on cognitive psychology was published. Before the publication of the monograph Cognitive Psychology, although cognitive psychology thoughts based on different information processing theories had appeared, and terms such as cognition, cognitive learning and cognitivism already existed, the term cognitive psychology was finalized after the publication of Naiser's monograph, so it can be said that he defined a new field that will dominate the field of psychology, so some people said that he "published an appropriate monograph at an appropriate time": Second, in the monograph, he was right. His definition of scientific research on internal processes such as storing knowledge and using knowledge is still widely adopted and recognized by modern cognitive psychologists. Thirdly, cognitive psychologists oppose the view that behavior belittles internal psychological processes and attach importance to cognitive processes such as language perception, thinking and memory. But at that time, these processes were all studied in isolation, and Naiser integrated these previously seemingly unrelated research fields into a closely related science. He advocates studying people's psychological activities from a holistic perspective, so it can be said that he provides a holistic framework for cognitive research.

Naiser believes that cognitive research should have ecological validity: in the face of the trend that the research scope of cognitive psychology is getting narrower and narrower, 1976 published the book Cognition and Reality. He proposed that cognitive research should have ecological validity, and emphasized that cognitive psychology research should pay attention to the world outside the laboratory. He criticized the mainstream research of cognitive psychology at that time for paying too much attention to the internal psychological processing process, exaggerating the role of the receiver and ignoring the influence of the environment. He also stressed that perception and evolution are similar, both related to the ability to adapt to the environment. Naiser believes that if the research of cognitive psychology is confined to the laboratory under strict control and engaged in research unrelated to daily life, its development will inevitably repeat the mistakes of behaviorism.

Academic achievements: Naiser's research field is quite extensive, among which the empirical research on memory and attention is the most, especially interested in the memory and memory illusion of life events in natural situations. When studying the relationship between visual perception and attention, it is proposed that there is an automatic pre-attention stage before visual perception processing. In the study of attention limitation, he verified that both the attributes and semantic features of stimuli affect attention, and put forward a constructive view that perception is shaped by existing knowledge and attention is influenced by personal experience. His visual letter recognition experiment is still used to study the influence of stimulus characteristics on attention. Naiser insists that cognitive research should be ecologically effective. This view was fully explained in his research on memory, and he was also the first psychologist who went out of the laboratory to study memory. It was his analysis of John Dean's testimony in the Watergate incident tape that triggered a craze for psychologists to study memory phenomena and memory problems in real life.

In his later years, Nasser turned his attention to the study of human intelligence, mainly studying how to measure people's IQ and explain the IQ differences between different social classes and races. 1996 After being invited as the president of the National Psychological Society, he set up a special committee to conduct in-depth research on Flynn effect (the phenomenon that IQ test scores increase by three points every ten years on average), and finally confirmed that Flynn effect does exist and human intelligence has a general improvement trend. With the improvement of education and nutrition. After fully studying technological changes and other factors, he proposed that the rich visual environment in modern society played a key role in improving IQ scores.