Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2 — John Shaqi
Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2
Science
Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2
Psychology, Experimental
"If we remember how extremely delicate is our normal sensitiveness for
retinal distances and how the newer studies in stereoscopic vision have
demonstrated an unsuspected delicacy of adjustment between retinal
images and motor responses, it is evident that this so far always
neglected relation must be an extremely important one. If we have
one adjustment of central reaction in which a certain eye-movement
corresponds to retinal images of one size, and another adjustment in
which the same movements correspond to retinal images which are ten
per cent larger, we can really not expect our judgment of distance
to neglect the difference between these two systems of relations. Of
course they represent two extreme cases. Every distance beyond 10 cm.
demands its special adjustment up to the point where the distance
becomes too large to be influenced by the distance from the nodal point
to the rotation-point. We must thus presuppose a sliding scale of ever
new adjustments for the different distances at which we see any object,
and we have, in this relation, probably not the least important factor
in the judgment of the third dimension for relatively near objects, and
probably even more important than the irradiation circles which control
the accommodation, as these circles must be the same for objects which
lie before and behind the fixation-point. Of course the whole system
of our localizing reactions becomes through these considerations more
complex by far than the schematizations of the text-books propose. But
physiological optics has shown at every point in its development that
mere simplification has not always meant a deeper insight into the real
relations."
It is evident that our studies in stereoscopic vision with lateral
eye-position involve exactly the same principle and reaffirm completely
Professor Münsterberg's theoretical views. In both cases, in the
monocular of the verant as in the binocular of our experiments, the
same retinal image has different psycho-physiological space-value on
account of the different motor situation.
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 1: Münsterberg: Perception of Distance, The Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. 1, p. 617, 1904.]
EYE-MOVEMENTS DURING DIZZINESS
BY E. B. HOLT
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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