CROSS-MODAL TRANSFER AND SENSORY EQUIVALENCE

Recent studies of cross-modal matching and transfer in animals and human subjects are reviewed and some problems concerning the design of experiments to study these phenomena discussed. Attempts to account for cross-modal effects are evaluated and the concept of sensory equivalence briefly examined.     

Localization of visceral pain and other sensations before and after anesthesia

The localization of sensations in sense organs that developed ontogenetically from the ectoderm layer, like vision, hearing, and skin, is much more precise than sensations inside the body, like pain in the chest or viscera, which are produced by receptors developed from the entoderm layer. Pain on the surface of the skin is much more sharply localized than is pain in the viscera. Personal experiences of pain sensations produced by an obstruction in the colon and the effects of anesthesia are described. It became evident that anesthesia can influence the activity of the vestibular organ for many days.     

Apparent image rotation in stereoscopic vision: The unbalance of the pupils

In binocular vision the apparent rotation of an object relative to the frontal plane seldom corresponds with the actual rotation. The reason for this is a difference in the brightness of the object in both eyes. It can be produced by a difference in the pupil size, adaptation, or sensitivity. One of the purposes of the pupils seems to be to compensate for this brightness unbalance and to make the apparent rotation come closer to the actual one. Unbalance was produced by placing a density filter before one eye, and the corresponding rotations were then measured. The rotations are affected by the irradiation in the eye, as a physical component, but also by the lateral inhibition in the visual nervous system. If the object and the background have a different color but there is no brightness difference on the edges of the object, there is no distorted rotation.     

Catching skills in infancy

Infants were induced to reach for fast moving objects whose velocity and starting position varied. Altogether, 144 reaches were analyzed by a technique that took into consideration the three-dimensional properties of reaches. It was found that reaches in all conditions were aimed close to the meeting point with the object. The precision in timing of a reach was about a twentieth of a second, and the systematic timing errors were close to zero. The results suggest that the infant reaches in reference to a coordinate system fixed to the moving object instead of to the static background, that is, the infant's hand is moved with the object at the same time as it is moved toward the object. It is concluded that the capacity to time and coordinate one's movements in the catching of a moving object is a very basic and early developed skill.     

Literary creations of schizophrenics

On the basis of material from the archiv of the district mental hospital Schwerin literary products of schizophrenic patients were examined and compared with the works of the primitives with the literature of manierism and "modern lyric".     

On the development of encoding in anticipation of various tests of retention

Abstract.— Seven, 9, 12–13, and 18–21-year-old subjects learned a pictorial material in anticipation of free recall (FR), serial recall (SR), or recognition tests. Type of anticipated test and test actually given were factorially combined, retention being tested after 2 min or after 2 weeks. Recall performance improved with age but recognition performance did not improve after CA 9. Differential anticipation had little effect on the performance of the youngest children. For older subjects the effects were clear-cut and similar at all age levels and at both retention intervals. SR and recognition performance was best when subjects anticipated these tests, respectively; anticipation of recognition interfered with recall performance, and vice versa. The main age-related improvement occurred between age levels 7 and 9.     

THE PERCEPTION OF A VISUAL SHAPE AND OF ITS FRAME-SURFACE DURING CONTINUOUS TRANSFORMATION

The procedure differed from that of traditional shape constancy experiments in that cues for the slant of the total frame-surface containing the main figure, a shadow rectangle, were given. The impression of slant was determined by gradients of continuous perspective transformations caused by movable elastic material casting its shadow on a translucent screen. The following hypothesis was confirmed: the tendency to see a shape in its original proportions (i.e., those it has when shown in a frontal-parallel orientation) increases with the increasingly strong impression of the slant of its plane surface.