Mary C. Potter

Mary Crawford Potter (born 1930) is an American psychologist and emerita professor of cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she remained for the rest of her career and retired in 2015. Born in Beirut, she took her undergraduate degree in psychology at Swarthmore College and her doctorate at Radcliffe College, where Jerry Bruner was her advisor, completing her thesis in 1961 before a postdoctoral post at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. Her research and teaching used experimental methods to study human cognition, with a particular interest in rapid visual processing while reading or viewing pictures and scenes. She was the first to work on rapid serial visual presentation and developed the methods to study its first second, finding that people grasp the meaning of phrases and pictures within fractions of a second, with pictures understood faster than writing. She was among the scientists who studied Patient HM, chaired the MIT faculty from 1985 to 1987, and received the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 2017.