PERSON
Ulric Neisser
The psychologist who named cognitive psychology in 1967 and then spent the rest of his career warning that the field—and the machines it inspired—had mistaken benchmark performance for genuine competence in the world.
Ulric Neisser is the founder who became his own field’s most penetrating internal critic. In 1967 he published Cognitive Psychology, the book that gave the field its name and its charter, making the mind’s inner processes a legitimate subject for science by describing them in the precise vocabulary of information flow. Then, in 1976, in Cognition and Reality, he turned around and charged the same field with a fatal flaw: it had built its knowledge on artificial laboratory tasks that bore little relation to how cognition actually operates in the world. The phrase he coined for the missing quality—ecological validity—has haunted cognitive science ever since, and it maps onto the AI moment with uncanny precision: the large language models that ace every benchmark and then fail in ways no competent human would are, in Neisser’s terms, the laboratory result writ in silicon. His mature theory of the perceptual cycle—perception as an active loop between anticipatory schemata and a world that answers back—names
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