Eugene Galanter

Who is Eugene Galanter?

Eugene Galanter is one of the founders of cognitive psychology. He is an academic in the field of experimental psychology and an author. Currently, Dr. Galanter is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Quondam Director of the Psychophysics Laboratory at Columbia University. He is also the co-founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Scientific Officer of Children’s Progress, an award-winning New York City-based company that specializes in the use of computer technology in early education. The company's assessments and reports have been used in 40 states and 9 countries.

After serving in the United States Armed Forces in World War II, Galanter attended Swarthmore College, receiving an Honors B.A. in 1950. He went on to graduate school in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and after receiving his Ph.D. in 1953, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematical Psychology in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Psychology. Additionally, during several leaves in the 1950s, Galanter collaborated with S. S. Stevens at Harvard University's psychoacoustics laboratory, co-authoring several publications.

While a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences of Stanford University Galanter began a collaboration with George A. Miller, and Karl H. Pribram, that resulted in the book Plans and the Structure of Behavior, a seminal work in the development of cognitive psychology published in 1960. By 1956, Galanter had started working towards a theoretical model that would integrate cognitive processes into the behaviorist's stimulus-response framework. In Plans and the Structure of Behavior, Miller, Galanter, and Pribram proposed that "some mediating organization of experience is necessary" between the stimulus and its behavioral response, i.e., that a cognitive feedback loop, which includes monitoring devices, must control the acquisition of the stimulus-response relationship. This feedback loop, the proposed fundamental unit of behavior, was referred to in Plans as the T.O.T.E., an abbreviation of its steps - test, operate, test, exit.