Ulric Neisser

German-born American psychologist (1928–2012) whose 1967 textbook Cognitive Psychology named and helped launch the field, and who then spent much of his career arguing that laboratory memory research had neglected the memory phenomena that matter in ordinary life. His 1981 study "John Dean's Memory: A Case Study" is the best-known product of that "ecological" turn: it compared John Dean's sworn Watergate testimony against the secretly recorded Nixon tapes and coined the term "repisodic" memory for recollection that is wrong about any single occasion yet accurate about a repeated series of events.

In this vault Neisser anchors the reconstructive-memory and testimony cluster — the lineage running back to Bartlett's constructive memory and across, by independent 1981 convergence, to the oral historian Alessandro Portelli. His John Dean paper is the vault's cleanest natural experiment in testimony checked against a literal record.

References

• claim-neisser-john-dean-testimony-repisodic-memory — the empirical finding: details wrong, gist right, self-centrality inflated
• claim-neisser-coined-repisodic-against-tulving-episodic-semantic — the coinage, defined against Tulving's episodic/semantic distinction
• claim-neisser-repisodic-memory-blends-a-repeated-series-not-one-episodes-gist — the mechanism: one apparent episode built from a repeated series
• observation-1981-convergence-testimony-wrong-in-detail-right-in-shape — the Neisser/Portelli cross-field convergence
• question-verify-neisser-john-dean-cognition-1981-primary — verification of the primary text (answered 2026-08-22)
• Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-portelli-neisser-testimony, 2026-08-21-verify-against-neissers-1981-primary-text-the-john