Table Of ContentEcological Approaches to Cognition
Essays in Honor of Ulric Neisser
EMORY SYMPOSIA IN COGNITION
Ulric Neisser
(Back row, L to R) Ira Hyman, Philippe Rochat, John Pani, Elizabeth Spelke,
Michael Tomasello, Arnold Stoper, Robyn Fivush.
(Front row, L to R) David Jopling, Eugene Winograd, William Hirst, Ulric Neisser,
Carolyn Mervis, Robert McCauley, Frank Keil.
Ecological Approaches to
Cognition
Essays in Honor of Ulric Neisser
Edited by
Eugene Winograd
Emory University
Robyn Fivush
Emory University
William Hirst
New School for Social Research
LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS
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Copyright © 1999 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
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Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
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Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ecological approaches to cognition: essays in honor of
Ulric Neisser/edited by Eugene Winograd, Robyn Fivush,
William Hirst.
p. cm.
Chiefly papers originally presented at a conference at
Emory University in November 1996.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0-8058-2729-3 (cloth: alk. paper).
I. Cognition—Congresses. I. Neisser, Ulric.
II. Winograd, Eugene. III. Fivush, Robyn.
IV. Hirst, William.
BF311.E27 1999
153–dc21 98–7417
CIP
ISBN 1-4106-0450-0 Master e-book ISBN
Contents
Preface vii
Part I: PERCEPTION AND ITS DEVELOPMENT
1 Direct Perception and Representation in Infancy
Philippe Rochat 3
2 Obstacles to Understanding: An Ecological Approach
to Infant Problem Solving 31
Karen E.Adolph and Marion Eppler
3 Descriptions of Orientation and Structure in Perception
and Physical Reasoning 59
John R.Pani
4 Height and Extent: Two Kinds of Size Perception 97
Arnold E.Stoper
Part II: COGNITION AND ITS DEVELOPMENT
5 EPAM to EGO: A Cognitive Journey 125
Eleanor J.Gibson
6 Unity and Diversity in Knowledge 139
Elizabeth Spelke
7 The Cultural Ecology of Young Children’s Interactions
with Objects and Artifacts 153
Michael Tomasello
v
vi ECOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO COGNITION
8 Getting a Grip on Reality 171
Frank Keil and Kristy Lockhart
9 The Williams Syndrome Cognitive Profile: Strengths,
Weaknesses, and Interrelations Among Auditory Short-
Term Memory, Language, And Visuospatial Constructive
Cognition 193
Carolyn B.Mervis
10 Creating False Autobiographical Memories: Why People
Believe Their Memory Errors 229
Ira E.Hyman, Jr.
11 Revisiting John Dean’s Memory 253
William Hirst and David Gluck
Part III: PHILOSOPHY AND EDUCATION
12 Bringing Ritual to Mind 285
Robert N.McCauley
13 Five Kinds of Self-Ignorance 313
David A.Jopling
14 How Does an Adviser Influence a Student?:
A Case Study 335
Yohtaro Takano
Author Index 357
Subject Index 367
Preface
In November 1996 a conference was held at Emory University to celebrate
Ulric (Dick) Neisser’s career in psychology. It was a celebration as well
as a reunion of Dick’s students, colleagues, and many friends. Besides
the talks, the weekend included parties and dinners appropriate to the
occasion. This volume reflects the talks that were presented during the
conference as well as contributions by Eleanor J.Gibson, Karen Adolph,
Marian Eppler, and Yohtaro Takano, who were unable to attend the
conference. What it may not reflect adequately is the outpouring of
affection and respect we saw for an honored and distinguished scholar
and teacher. In line with Dick’s wishes, all of the contributors were at one
time either his graduate students or colleagues at Brandeis, Cornell, or
Emory, the three institutions at which he has taught.
Dick Neisser is a rare figure in modern psychology in many ways
and especially for the breadth of his scholarship. His theoretical and
empirical contributions to our understanding of visual search, attention,
visual imagery, memory, and the self are all well known. It is no surprise,
then, that this book reflects the breadth and richness, to use one of Dick’s
favorite words, of the field that he did so much to shape.
We will only briefly outline Dick’s biography here. Born in Kiel,
Germany in 1928, Dick came to the United States when he was 4 years old.
His father, a professor of economics, was part of the early wave of German
emigre scholars who foresaw the consequences of the rise of Fascism. Dick
grew up in the Philadelphia and New York suburbs while his father taught
at the University of Pennsylvania and the New School for Social Research.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Dick was a student of George Miller
and carried out his senior research thesis in Miller’s laboratory. After
graduating summa cum laude in 1950, Dick showed his independence of
mind by going to Swarthmore to study Gestalt Psychology with Wolfgang
Köhler and Hans Wallach. It was clear that behaviorism, so dominant at
the time, had no appeal for him. After completing the MA at Swarthmore,
Dick went to study at MIT’s new psychology department but found its
focus on information theory too narrow and did not stay long. Instead, he
returned to Harvard, where he completed his dissertation research with S.
S.Stevens. By 1957, he had his first teaching job, at Brandeis. There, he was
impressed by Abraham Maslow’s emphasis on psychology as a force for
good. While at Brandeis, Dick carried out his important studies on visual
vii
viii ECOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO COGNITION
search, the work for which he was best known prior to the publication of
Cognitive Psychology in 1967.
Few books in psychology have had the impact or staying power of
Cognitive Psychology. It not only named a new field that quickly came to
dominate the discipline, it showed how what had been seen as unrelated
research areas such as perception, language, memory, imagery, and
thinking could be integrated into a coherent framework. Like Moliere’s
character who was gratified to learn that he had been speaking prose all
his life, a generation of psychologists were pleased to find that they had
been doing cognitive psychology. The book was magisterial, lucid, and
timely. Its unifying concept was information. In an interview published in
Bernard Baars’ 1986 book, The Cognitive Revolution, Dick said:
I was convinced that information was a central concept, and that
you could follow it inward through the organism. There were
Gestalt processes at the beginning that were needed to partition
the input, and constructive memory processes at the end with a
sort of humanistic flavor. I decided to put it all together into a book.
(p. 279)
In 1968, Dick and his wife Arden moved to Cornell. There, influenced
by J.J.Gibson, Dick modified the strongly constructivist view adopted in
Cognitive Psychology to take into account the Gibsonian credo that “The
information is in the light.” In Cognition and Reality (1976), he argued for an
ecologically based approach to cognition, emphasizing the world outside
the laboratory. He criticized mainstream cognitive psychology for lacking
ecological validity and, generally, for its excessively narrow preoccupation
with internal processes. Contemporary theories of perception, he argued,
glorified the perceiver and ignored the richness of the environment.
Dick argued that perception, like evolution, involved adaptation to the
environment. Commenting later on this marked change in his own views,
in spite of the enormous success of his earlier book, Dick said:
I’ve always been in the position of liking what other people don’t
like, so I was a little surprised when cognitive psychology caught
on so well. Of course, I had fantasies of success, but I generally
think of myself as a marginal, critical theorist. I was caught by
surprise, because I’m usually on the outs. And you’ll see that I very
quickly reestablished my position on the outs. I can’t handle the
mainstream very well. (Baars, 1986, p. 280)
Although it may be true that Dick does not appear to be able to handle the
mainstream very well, to many it appears that the mainstream is in the
habit of chasing after him.
PREFACE ix
Since the publication of Cognition and Reality, Dick has consistently
applied an ecological approach to cognition. Some examples from memory
research are his analysis of John Dean’s testimony, involving detailed
analysis of the Watergate tapes, his work on the memory of Baker Street
Irregulars for Sherlock Holmes stories, and his many publications on the
problem of flashbulb memories. In this research, Dick showed that memory
for real world events can be studied with the same rigor as laboratory
research. When he came to Emory in 1983, it was as an ecologically oriented
cognitive psychologist. He founded the Emory Cognition Project and,
under its auspices, organized a series of conferences on different topics
in cognitive psychology, including categorization and its development,
memory and its development, language development, and different
aspects of the self. Each conference, at least in part, was concerned with
the issues that an ecological approach to cognition presents. Eight of these
conferences resulted in books. In addition to cognitive psychologists,
contributors included anthropologists, literary scholars, psychiatrists,
linguists, and philosophers. A generation of Emory graduate students
benefitted from the exciting talks and discussions that characterized
these conferences. Special attention should be paid to the pervasiveness
of developmental issues in these conferences. It is Dick’s strong belief
that cognition and its development are inextricably bound up together.
This was reflected in the conferences and, more directly, in the guiding
role he played in building a single graduate program in cognition and
development at Emory.
In recent years, Dick has been interested in intelligence—how it is
measured and how social class and racial differences in IQ should be
interpreted. This research is a direct result of Dick’s deep concern with
what psychology can do to make the world a better place. For years, Dick
has taught an undergraduate course on intelligence. He was invited to head
the American Psychological Association task force that was established
to examine recent controversial issues in the study of intelligence. The
report of this task force was published in American Psychologist in 1996.
Subsequently, Dick organized a conference on the Flynn effect, the
substantial gain in raw scores on IQ tests spanning decades (Neisser,
1998).
The present volume is organized into three sections: Perception and
Its Development, Cognition and Its Development, and Philosophy and
Education. The chapters reflect the reach of Dick’s influence. There are
deep themes running throughout Dick’s work, and none more important
than that cognition occurs in the world. Cognition is a consequence of the
context in which it occurs, a consequence that Dick in so many profound
ways has expounded on. That Dick would sound this note with such
clarity and purpose is not surprising if one knows Dick because he has
always been engaged in the world around him. The intense and careful
