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 towards the environmental psychology of his friend J. J. Gibson.

He is presently at Cornell University where his research interests include memory, especially memory for life events and in natural settings; intelligence, especially individual and group differences in test scores, IQ tests and their social significance; self-concepts, especially as based on self-perception. His latest works include The Rising Curve: Long-Term Gains in IQ and Related Measures (1998) and , with L. K. Libby, "Remembering life experiences" (In E. Tulving & F. I .M. Craik’s The Oxford Handbook of Memory, 2000)