Donald Olding Hebb was born in 1904 in Chester, Nova Scotia. He graduated from Dalhousie University in 1925, and tried to begin a career as a novelist. He wound up as a school principle in Quebec.

He began as a part-time graduate student at McGill University in Montreal. Here, he began quickly disillusioned with behaviorism and turned to the work of Kohler and Lashley. Working with Lashley, he received his PhD from Harvard in 1936.

He took on a fellowship with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where his research noted that large lesions in the brain often have little effect on a person's perception, thinking, or behavior.

Moving on to Queens University, he researched intelligence testing of animals and humans. He noted that the environment played a far more significant role in intelligence than generally assumed.

In 1942, he worked with Lashley again, this time at the Yerkes Lab of Primate Biology. He then returned to McGill as a professor of psychology, and became the department chairperson in 1948.

The following year, he published his most famous book, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. This was very well received and made McGill a center for neuropsychology.

The basics of his theory can be summarized by defin-ing three of his terms: First, there is the Hebb synapse. Ilepeated firing of a neuron causes growth or metabolic changes at the synapse that increase the efficiency of that synapse in the future. This is often called consolidation theory, and is the most accepted explanation for neural looming today.

Second, there is the Hebb cell assembly. There are groups of neurons so interconnected that, once activity begins, it persists well after the original stimulus is gone. Today, people call these neural nets.

And third, there is the phase sequence. Thinking is what happens when complex sequences of these cell assemblies are activated.

He humbly suggested that his theory is just a new version of connectionism — a neo- or neuro-connectionism. It should be noted that he was president of both the АРА and its Canadian cousin, the CPA. Donald Hebb died in 1985.

George A. Miller

George A. Miller, born in 1920, began his career in college as a speech and English major. In 1941, he received his masters in speech from the University of Alabama. In 1946 he received his PhD from Harvard and began to study psycholinguistics.

In 1951, he published his first book, titled Language and Communication. In it, he argued that the behaviorist tradition was insufficient to the task of explaining language.

He wrote his most famous paper in 1956: «The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information*. In it, he argued that short-term memory could only hold about seven pieces — called chunks — of information: Seven words, seven numbers, seven faces, whatever. This is still accepted as accurate.

In 1960, Miller founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with famous cognitivist developmentalist, Jerome Bruner. In that same year, he published Plans and the Structure of Behavior (with Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram, 1960), which outlined their conception of cognitive psychology. They used the computer as their model of human learning, and used such analogies as information processing, encoding, and retrieval. Miller went so far as to define psychology as the study of the mind, as it had been prior to the behaviorist redefinition of psychology as the study of behavior. 1 George Miller served as the president of АРА 1969, and received the prestigious National Medal of Science in 1991. He is still teaching as professor emeritus at Princeton University.

Ulric Neisser

Ulric Neisser was born in 1928 in Kiel, Germany, and moved with his family to the US at the age of three.

He studied at Harvard as a physics major before switching to psychology. While there, he was influenced by Koffka's work and by George Miller. In 1950, he received his bachelors degree, and in 1956, his PhD. At this point, he was a behaviorist, which was basically what everyone was at the time.

His first teaching position was at Brandeis, where Maslow was department head. Here he was encouraged to pursue his interest in cognition. In 1967, he wrote the book that was to mark the official beginning of the cognitive movement, Cognitive Psychology.

Later, in 1976, he wrote Cognition and Reality, in which he began to express a dissatisfaction with the linear programming model of cognitive psychology at that time, and the excessive reliance on laboratory work, rather than real-life situations. Over time, he would become a vocal critic of cognitive psychology, and moved