Ulric Neisser

"Attention is not a mysterious concentration of psychic energy; it is simply an allotment of analyzing mechanisms to a limited region of the field. To pay attention to a figure is to make certain analy…"

"Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although c…"

"The attentive synthesis of any particular letter or figure takes an appreciable time, of the order of 100ms...If a whole row of letters is to be identified, they must be synthesized one at a time... T…"

"Paying attention is not just analyzing carefully; rather, it is a constructive act... What we build has only the dimensions we have given it."

"To deal with the whole visual input at once, and make discriminations based on any combination of features in the field, would require too large a brain, or too much "previous experience" to be plausi…"

"The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in…"

"Cognitive processes surely exist, so it can hardly be unscientific to study them."

"The fact that the span of apprehension averages only four or five... probably results from the high rate of encoding. In a tachistoscopic experiment the subject must read the fading icon as rapidly as…"