The journey I tell about here was not mine, but I witnessed some of it and occasionally took bit parts by way of argument and exchange of ideas. It would require a full-scale biography (which someone will write eventually) to do justice to this journey. I intend to dwell on three periods along the way. They are not properly stages because the destination was not known but rather periods that mark a time of fruition, leading dynamically to new paths of progress. The first period was quite early in this journey, around the time Ulric Neisser’s first book was published in the mid-1960s. The name given the favored style of thinking at the time by the avant-garde psychologists was information processing (although of course Neisser called his book Cognitive Psychology). The second period came later when Neisser was a professor at Cornell, intellectual change was in the air, and he moved from a concern with coded information to more naturalistic subject matter. Innovative ideas and methods were rife and there were gifted graduate students trying them out. The third period (still to be completed) brings two, once thought to be opposing, views together, one ecological and the other deeply cognitive; that is, Neisser’s reintroduction of the self into psychology, at Emory.
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