Max Wertheimer's challenging legacy

Summary Max Wertheimer's past contributions to psychology were recognized, 45 years after his death, by the posthumous award to him in 1988 of the Wilhelm Wundt medal of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie. The award acknowledged the elegant model of experimental work represented by his original studies of the perception of apparent motion, the development and promulgation of the influential Gestalt theory, and the application of Gestalt thought to significant issues of epistemology, ethics, and social and political science. But Max Wertheimer's contribution is not only of historical interest; it still constitutes a contemporary challenge. First, his seminal book, Productive Thinking, has recently been reissued with a new preface that documents the challenge of its characterization of insight or understanding for the current field of cognitive science. Second, his works, originally in English, on truth, ethics, freedom and democracy are now being published in German as clearly still highly relevant to the current scence. Third, several previously unpublished fragments, dictated by Max Wertheimer, address the nature of genuine explanation; they argue that simply reducing the unfamiliar to the familiar is not enough, but that genuine explanation occurs only if a situation previously not understood becomes clarified, changing from a murky to a transparent state. Some concrete examples described in these fragments provide a challenge to traditional conceptions of the nature of explanation which is still far from satisfactorily answered today.     

Psychiatry of the Elderly: A Consensus Statement

This document is a consensus statement on Psychiatry of the Elderly jointly produced by WHO and the Geriatric Psychiatry Section of the World Psychiatric Association, with the collaboration of several pertinent NGOs and the participation of experts from countries in several WHO regions.     

Iconic memory: A reply to Professor Holding

Professor Holding has argued that the partial report superiority normally taken as evidence for the existence of iconic memory might instead be due to cue anticipation or output interference. I have suggested that both of these alternative explanations are inconsistent with the finding that the partial report superiority diminishes rapidly with increasing cue delay. In addition, Sperling’s original partial report experiment was designed in such a way that cue anticipation could not have occurred; and both his results with selection by letter vs number and Averbach and Coriell’s bar-marker results indicate that output interference effects are absent or negligible in tachistoscopic experiments. Consequently, I have concluded that the partial report superiority, and especially its decline with increasing delay, remains as strong evidence in favor of the conventional view of iconic memory. Furthermore, if this view were wrong, there would remain no way of giving a satisfactory account of (a) Averbach and Coriell’s results, (b) “direct” investigations of visual persistence, or (c) integration and interruption effects in backward visual masking.     

Evidence for an integration theory of visual masking

When letters are superimposed upon a pattern of black and white squares, they are easier to identify when the pattern is regular than when it is random. If backward masking consists of the superimposition of a masking pattern upon the decaying visual trace of a target display, a regular pattern should be less effective as a backward mask than a random pattern. This was found to be so for both multiple-letter and single-letter displays. This result is predicted by an integration theory of visual masking but not by an interruption theory.     

Is the holocaust relevant to sociobiology?

Sociobiologists have emphasized that altruism and benevolent behavior are part of the genetic repertoire of most animals and certainly of man. They have constructed a theory of ethics as a biological phenomenon without reference to the concept of evil. It is concluded here however, that holocaust behavior is not equivalent to the natural manifestation of an incompletely tamed animal flashing its teeth. Biologists have been too rigid in trying to equate ethical behavior with social behavior. The added dimension of ethical behavior is a special kind of sensitivity to the needs of others, just as evil is the total lack of it. The evolution of this moral sense may itself have important selective value for the human species, whose survival depends on creating maximal diversity in its gene pool.     

Book reviews

GEOGRAPHY, R. L. and GOMBRICH, E. H. (Eds). Illusion in Nature and Art. Gerald Duckworth and Co Ltd. 1973. Pp. 288. £7.50/£3.25.

HARTMANN, E. L. The Functions of Sleep. London: Yale University Press. 1974. Pp. 198. £ 3.50.

RADFORD, J. and BURNTON, A. Thinking: its Nture and Devolopment. London: Wiley. 1974. Pp. 440. £ 6.95. Soft cover £ 3.25.

MACE, C. A. Selected Paper. London: Methuen and Co Ltd. 1973. Pp. 420. £ 6.50.

WOLFF, J. G. Language, Brain and Hearing. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd. 1973 Pp. 237. £ 3050.

BATTRO, A. M. Piaget: Dictionary of Terms. Oxford: Pergamon Press Ltd. 1973. Pp. 186. £ 5.75.

MUSSEN, P. H. and ROZENSWEIG, M. R. Annual Review of Psychology. Annual Reviews Inc: Palo Alto, Califonia. Pp. 551. 12.50.     

In defence of iconic memory

According to a model of visual information-processing which originated with Sperling (1960), and which currently enjoys wide acceptance, the contents of brief alphanumeric displays are initially held in a high-capacity fast-decay visual-information store (“iconic memory”). Some of these items are subsequently transferred to a more durable form of storage; the remaining non-transferred items are lost. Observers can select which items are to be transferred on the basis of physical characteristics of the items (such as colour, location, size, shape or brightness).

This model has recently been attacked by Holding (1970, 1971, 1972, 1973), sometimes by claiming that iconic memory does not exist, and at other times by claiming that transfer from iconic memory cannot be selectively controlled by the observer. We argue in this paper that Holding's criticisms are incorrect, and that, even if they were correct, the experiment we report would not be open to objections he has raised concerning previous studies of iconic memory. Despite this, evidence fully supporting the orthodox model was obtained, and we therefore conclude that this model remains tenable.     

Memory of a speaker's voice: Reaction time to same- or different-voiced letters

Subjects were presented with a sequence of two letters, each letter spoken in either a male or female voice. On each trial, the subject was required to indicate, as quickly as possible, whether the two letters had the same name. Reaction times (RTs) were faster for letters spoken in the same voice for both “same” and “different” responses, even when letters were separated by 8 s. These results are incompatible with the notion of physical and name codes in auditory memory since a “different” response should always be based on a comparison of letter names and should not be influenced by voice quality. It was also found that RTs were not influenced by the phonemic distinctive feature similarity of the letters.