Ulric Gustav Neisser (1928-2012) was an American psychologist of German origin. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received worldwide reputation for his work in the development of cognitive science and the transition from behavioral to cognitive approaches in psychology with his 1967 book Cognitive Psychology. His work also involves the study of attention, memory and intelligence. He is the 32nd of the APA's 100 Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century. OverviewNeisser was born into a Jewish family on December 8, 1928. At the age of 5, to escape persecution by the Nazi Germans, his family moved to Pennsylvania and settled in Swarthmore following his father's appointment to the Wharton Business School. He enrolled at Harvard University in 1946 to study physics, but after two years he discovered his passion for the Gestalt vision of psychology versus behaviorism. Not long after graduating from Harvard, he went to Swarthmore College for his master's degree, where he worked with Wolfgang Köhler, Hans Wallach, and Henry Gleitman. After receiving his master's degree in 1952, he realized that the future of psychology lay in Gestaltism. He returned to Harvard to attend graduate school and received his doctorate in 1956. Neisser worked briefly at Harvard and Brandeis, where he was influenced by the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow. His book Cognitive Psychology was written at the University of Pennsylvania and published in 1967. Neisser was hired by the Gibsons to work as a full professor at Cornell University shortly after this publication. Influenced by James Gibson's theory of perception, he reevaluated his initial themes in Cognitive Psychology and supplemented his 1976 book Cognition and Reality with re...... half of paper ......most of Ulric Neisser it was his resilience in maintaining an impartial and open mind towards his own work and his art of maintaining academic independence and collaboration with his colleagues. As he acknowledged in the interview with Szokolszky (2013), not long after his success with his Cognitive Psychology, he became speculative about his description of the constructive process of perception. As mentioned above, Neisser's information processing model starts from the retinal image, while in Gibson's model it starts from the ambient light reflected by the object. He embraced Gibson's model and justified its superiority over his. Sometimes we focus too much on defending our opinion, but that overprotection often comes from neglecting the valuable ideas of others. The relationship between Neisser and Gibson is a perfect example of academic independence and collaboration.