Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1: Containing Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.
Science
Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1: Containing Sixteen Experimental Investigations from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory.
Psychology, Experimental
Clearly the bands are not formed simultaneously, but one after another
as the pendulum passes through successive positions. And of course the
newest bands are those which lie immediately behind the pendulum. It
must now be asked, Why, if these bands are produced successively, are
they seen simultaneously? To this, Jastrow and Moorehouse have given
the answer, "We are dealing with the phenomena of after-images." The
bands persist as after-images while new ones are being generated. The
very oldest, however, disappear _pari-passu_ with the generation of
the new. We have already seen (p. 169) how well these authors have
shown this, in proving that the number of bands seen, multiplied by
the rate of rotation of the disc, is a constant bearing some relation
to the duration of a retinal image of similar brightness to the bands.
It is to be noted now, however, that as soon as the rod has produced a
band and passed on, the after-image of that band on the retina is
exposed to the same stimulation from the rotating disc as before, that
is, is exposed to the fused color; and this would tend to obliterate
the after-images. Thus the oldest bands would have to disappear more
quickly than an unmolested after-image of the same original
brightness. We ought, then, to see somewhat fewer bands than the
formula of Jastrow and Moorehouse would indicate. In other words, we
should find on applying the formula that the 'duration of the
after-image' must be decreased by a small amount before the numerical
relations would hold. Since Jastrow and Moorehouse did not determine
the relation of the after-image by an independent measurement, their
work neither confirms nor refutes this conjecture.
What they failed to emphasize is that the real origin of the bands is
not the intermittent appearances of the rod opposite the _lighter_
sector, as they seem to believe, but the successive eclipse by the rod
of _each_ sector in turn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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