February 17, 2012

2012Robert Carr, English engineer and politician, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (born 1916)^[†]

Leonard Robert Carr, Baron Carr of Hadley, was a British Conservative Party politician who served as Home Secretary from 1972 to 1974. He served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for 26 years, and later served in the House of Lords as a life peer.

2012Michael Davis, American singer-songwriter and bass player (born 1943)^[†]

Michael Davis was an American bass guitarist, singer, songwriter and music producer, best known as a member of the MC5.

2012Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn, Dutch mathematician and theorist (born 1918)^[†]

Nicolaas Govert "Dick" de Bruijn was a Dutch mathematician, noted for his many contributions in the fields of analysis, number theory, combinatorics and logic.

2012Ulric Neisser, German-American psychologist and academic (born 1928)^[†]

Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser (December 8, 1928 – February 17, 2012) was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive psychology". Neisser researched and wrote about perception and memory. He posited that a person's mental processes could be measured and subsequently analyzed. In 1967, Neisser published Cognitive Psychology, which he later said was considered an attack on behaviorist psychological paradigms. Cognitive Psychology brought Neisser instant fame and recognition in the field of psychology. While Cognitive Psychology was considered unconventional, it was Neisser's Cognition and Reality that contained some of his most controversial ideas. A main theme in Cognition and Reality is Neisser's advocacy for experiments on perception occurring in natural settings. Neisser postulated that memory is, largely, reconstructed and not a snap shot of the moment. Neisser illustrated this during one of his highly publicized studies on people's memories of the Challenger explosion. In his later career, he summed up current research on human intelligence and edited the first major scholarly monograph on the Flynn effect. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Neisser as the 32nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.