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
Black will predominate, then, on both sides of _x_, but specially
between _x_ and _y_. For a space, then, the characteristic effect will
contain enough black to yield a 'perception of the rod.' The width of
this region depends on the width and speed of the rod, but in Fig. 9
it will be roughly coincident with _xy_, though somewhat behind (to
the left of) it. The characteristic will be either wholly black, as
just at _x_, or else largely black with the yet contributory
after-images (shown in the triangle _aby_). Some bands will thus be
seen overlying the rod (1-8), and others lying back of it (9-16).
We have now reviewed all the phenomena so far enumerated of the
illusion-bands, and for every case we have identified these bands with
the bands which must be generated on the retina by the mere
concealment of the rotating sectors by the moving rod. It has been
more feasible thus far to treat these deduction-bands as if possibly
they were other than the bands of the illusion; for although the
former must certainly appear on the retina, yet it was not clear that
the illusion-bands did not involve additional and complicated retinal
or central processes. The showing that the two sets of bands have in
every case identical properties, shows that they are themselves
identical. The illusion-bands are thus explained to be due merely to
the successive concealment of the sectors of the disc as each passes
in turn behind the moving pendulum. The only physiological phenomena
involved in this explanation have been the persistence as after-images
of retinal stimulations, and the summation of these persisting images
into characteristic effects--both familiar phenomena.
From this point on it is permissible to simplify the point of view by
accounting the deduction-bands and the bands of the illusion fully
identified, and by referring to them under either name indifferently.
Figs. 1 to 9, then, are diagrams of the bands which we actually
observe on the rotating disc. We have next briefly to consider a few
special complications produced by a greater breadth or slower movement
of the rod, or by both together. These conditions are called
'complicating' not arbitrarily, but because in fact they yield the
bands in confusing form. If the rod is broad, the bands appear to
overlap; and if the rod moves back and forth, at first rapidly but
with decreasing speed, periods of mere confusion occur which defy
description; but the bands of the minor color may be broader or _may
be narrower_ than those of the other color.
VII. FURTHER COMPLICATIONS OF THE ILLUSION.
9. If the rod is broad and moves slowly, the narrower bands are like
colored, not with the broader, as before, but with the narrower
sector.
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