Brief
History of the
Cognitive Neuroscience Program
The Dept. of Psychology at CCNY emerged from the Dept. of Philosophy in 1937 and in 1940, wooed Gardiner Murphy from Columbia to become its Chair, which he retained until his retirement in 1952. Murphy had a broad conception of psychology and used it to create an undergraduate Department that soon, from 1949 to the 1970s, sent more students to graduate school and obtain the Ph.D. than any other psychology department in the nation. He became President of the Eastern Psychological assn., the American Psychological Assn., and the society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Among his early honors students were Roy Schafer, Leo Postman, and Harold Proshansky, who went on to become President the Graduate School and University Center of CUNY.
The breadth of Murphy’s intellectual reach produced traditions that remain with the Department today. On the one hand, he created a program that pioneered the “New Look” in perception, the role of motivation in perception. This led to pioneering work in projective techniques for the measurement of personality and psychpathology, and, in 1946, to the establishment of an MA program in psychology, the first graduate program in any of the New York City colleges. Upon formation of CUNY, this program expanded to realize Murphy’s long-time goal of a Ph.D. Subprogram in Clinical Psychology at City College.
The other side of Murphy’s breadth led to the establishment experimental psychology as a strong basis for the study of perception, attention and learning. In a later study of Department alumni, students rated the difficult Experimental course as the most important in their undergraduate career. With the addition of Danny Lehman to the Department, this included a strong psychophysiological side. Murphy, and his junior colleague, Jeb Barmack saw clinical psychoanalysis and experimental psychology as joint paths toward an integrated psychology. Barmack became a subject in the famous NSF study where experimental psychologists went through psychoanalysis, in the hope that they might find ways to study the analytic process.
But the primary focus of Barmack’s research was the study of attention. In this effort, he linked behavioral and physiological perspectives. His dissertation at Columbia involved CO2-O2, exchange in thinking processes. Just as the demands in World War II for rapid, accurate personnel selection expanded the scope of clinical psychology, so too the need for better understanding of man-machine interactions expanded the growth of the research field of applied psychology, the forerunner of cognitive psychology. Barmack was working in applied psychology for the military when CUNY was created, and he was elected, in absentia, to head the Department. He was distressed that his plan for CCNY to house an applied social psychology Ph.D. subprogram was lost when the Graduate Center hired Stan Milgram. And when the Museum of Natural History linked up with Hunter College to form the Biopsychology Ph.D. Subprogram, he also lost his physiological psychologists, including Phil Ziegler, now Distinguished Professor of Psychology.
Barmack’s primary research agenda for the Department became twofold. First, he wanted to make research a valued activity within the new Clinical Ph.D. Subprogram, and to this end he brought in Jerome L. Singer to head the Clinical Psychology. Singer was PI in several NIMH grants concerned with daydreaming and mind wandering as a personal exploratory cognitive skill., and with his colleague, John Antrobus, continued this research until he left to head the Clinical program at Yale. Secondly, Barmack wanted to establish a second Ph.D. subprogram at City, one that would attract a strong research oriented faculty and student body. Without a research oriented graduate program, Barmack felt that the entire Department, including its strong undergraduate base, would lose its intellectual foundation.
During this period, the Singer and Antrobus mind wandering research became increasingly concerned with attentional and vigilance processes, including sensory and perceptual deprivation, which were turning toward the intersection of personality, and applied space and man-machine information processing research, which in turn, were morphing into a new field called cognitive psychology. Undergraduate applications were surging, so the Department was is a position to hire 12 new faculty for a new subprogram. Barmack persuaded his former City College colleague, Proshansky, then President, that an Cognitive Neuroscience subprogram was not only essential for City College, but very good for the University. The University Executive Council in Psychology agreed, and the program began, with Antrobus as head.
Although the original Cognition program covered every area of classic cognition from reading, to mental “set,” to affect, stress, and states of consciousness, a dominant focus was determined by three well funded teams of experimenters in the field of sleep, including two animal labs: Fishbein in learning and consolidation, and Ellman and Steiner in stimulation of the brain stem pleasure centers and REM sleep. Arkin, Antrobus and Ellman were funded to study the effects of REM deprivation on sleep mentation. Together with the Singer and Antrobus projects on psychophysiological processes in attentional and mind wandering states, these projects, all funded by NIMH, created a strong physiological bias within the cognition program. With the addition of two major scientists concerned with ERPs and particularly, P3 in the program – Walter Ritter, as an Adjunct Professor, and Lou Costa on the faculty, the bridge between cognition and neurophysiology was firmly established, and the program moved to become the first clinical neuropsychology program in the State – except in name.
When Costa eventually left to become a Dean at the University of Victoria, Jeff Rosen came to City to head neuropsychology training and developed it to a very successful program. But the “pre-neural” cognitive faculty in the program were reluctant to retrain themselves to support this new effort, so when, in the mid 80s, the economic recession cut funding for the neuropsychology clinic at City, clinical neuropsychology training could no longer survive. Fortunately, Queens, the holder of the Neuropsychology Subprogram title, started their clinical neuropsychology effort about this time, and it has developed a thriving program, with several of our graduates as faculty. Then the APA began to restrict clinical neuropsychology internships to students in APA approved clinical psychology programs, so it became increasingly difficult to place neuropsychology students in internships. Fortunately, the CUNY Clinical Subprogram is based at CCNY, so Profs. Rosen and Gomes have begun to train interested clinical students in neuropsychology.
By this time, NIMH had pretty much ceased funding research in sleep and dreaming, and the sleep field was turning toward the previously neglected field of sleep disorders, such as insomnia and the deficits in waking cognitive performance associated with excessive daytime sleepiness. Spielman, Diplomate in the American Board of Sleep Medicine, and an early leader in this field began to build what is now one of the best sleep disorders training programs in the nation. This new field also requires that students obtain practica and internship training, which Spielman has set up in New York City hospitals.
The rapid growth in cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience, that initiated the original development of the Experimental Psychology program, had now spread to the medical research centers, many of them concentrated in the New York City area. They were now recruiting investigators and research assistants from the graduates of Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology subprogram. As we show in the Proposed Reorganization page, close collaboration with colleagues in these institutions has become essential to the continuing development of any doctoral cognitive psychology program, and Cognitive Neuroscience subprogram has vigorously pursued this route. The on-campus base for this laboratory training has, in recent years, been Diana Deacon's ERP lab. Deacon has been funded entirely by NIMH research grants and has graduated many excellent cognitive neuropsychologists who have gone on to both university teaching and hospital research positions. Recently, Prof. Hilary Gomes has receive NIMH funding for an ERP project associated with reading disorders, and she is training both Cognitive Neuroscience and Clinical graduate students.
The cognitive neuropsychology strength of Cognitive Neuroscience, however, reminds us that the program has almost neglected Barmack’s original goal of attracting research professors and students across the entire domain of cognition. To correct this neglect, the Department hired Prof. Vivian Tartter, a well-known psycholinguist and the author of two important texts in the field, who began by applying language science to reading in New York City classrooms. As acting Dean of Social Science Prof. Tartter continues, in collaboration with Prof. Gomes, her research in the field, and also teaches graduate courses in language processes. The department then hired Prof. Margaret Rosario, an expert in violence and also AIDS prevention, gender and identity issues, to renew the social cognition side of the Cognitive Neuroscience program. Prof. Brett Silverstein, has used his influence as Chair of the Department to rebuild the applied social cognition part of the program. This effort is described in the Reorganization Proposal.