Karl Harry Pribram ([ˈpr̝̊iːbram]) (February 25, 1919 – January 19, 2015) was an American-Austrian researcher in the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, holonomic brain theory, and holographic consciousness. He was a professor at Georgetown University and an emeritus professor at Stanford University at the time of his death. Before moving to Georgetown, he was the James P. and Anna King Distinguished Professor at Radford University. He was best known for his work on the holonomic brain theory.

Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960), co-written with George Armitage Miller and Eugene Galanter, is widely credited as a seminal work in the development of the field of cognitive psychology. This work fueled the cognitive revolution, which established cognitive psychology as the dominant trend in psychology, replacing behaviorism.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Pribram became "recognized for pioneering research defining the boundaries of the limbic system." Through more than 50 surgical experiments, Pribram's laboratory was able to establish that the limbic system, governing emotions, also interacted with the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, governing personality, decision making, and social behavior. He discovered the "sensory specific" functions of the Association cortex, revealing that these systems organize the choices we make among sensory inputs, which supports higher order cognitive processes, such as perception, language and thought.

In 1958, Pribram coined the term "the Four F's" ("Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing and Sex") to describe the functions of the fronto-limbic system (the limbic system including the pre-frontal and association cortex). Additionally, through extensive laboratory testing with primates, Pribram and his students discovered that removal of the amygdala from these systems affected this set of behaviors, resulting in reset of hierarchical relationships within the group.

Pribram's work Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing (1991) conveyed his theory, based on experimental evidence, that sensory perception, along with memory storage and retrieval, is processed through dendritic fields, in a manner similar to quantum field theory.

Pribram describes his discovery, through extensive experiments with graduate students Mortimer Mishkin, John Robert Anderson, and Leslie Ungerleider, of the importance of the inferior temporal cortex's role in vision. Until this discovery, the temporal lobe was thought to be devoted to hearing.

In Brain and Perception, Pribram also addresses the longstanding question of whether brain functions are distributed or localized. He "emphasizes the fact that both distributed (holistic) and localized (structural) processes characterize brain function." He further analyzes wave-type input received by our senses (touch, taste, smell, sound and sight) through lens-like receptors (e.g., the cochlea for sound waves).

Pribram provides models of his experimental data, developed with the Japanese mathematical physicists Kunio Yasue and Mari Jibu, in order to demonstrate how we receive, perceive, and retrieve information from the outside world ("navigate" our world).