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- Vol 4 RE: Chapter 1
cognitive psychologyinformation processingperceptionpattern recognitionattentionmemory systemsmental representationsBook Evidence summaryAt a glance
Neisser helped define cognitive psychology as the study of processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. The book synthesizes mid-twentieth-century research on perception, pattern recognition, attention, auditory and visual processing, imagery, memory, and thought, presenting the mind as an active information-processing system rather than a passive chain of stimulus and response.
Key ideas
Perception involves construction and organization: people select information, form representations, and use prior structures to interpret what reaches the senses. Separate chapters examine iconic and echoic storage, attention, immediate and long-term memory, speech perception, visual cognition, and higher mental activity. Neisser evaluates competing models and laboratory findings while helping establish a shared vocabulary for the cognitive revolution. Some mechanisms and computational metaphors have since been revised, and he later criticized the field's limited ecological validity.
Why it matters
Even so, the book's historical importance lies in organizing cognition as a coherent scientific domain and foregrounding active mental operations that mediate between environmental information and observable behavior.
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Edition abbreviations
- TE
- Teacher Edition
- PE
- Practice Edition
- RE
- Research Edition
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