Relation of mobility-fixity to the interpretation of pictorial stimuli

A group of 61 students who had previously (in 1986) been classified by Hansson, Rydén, and Johnsson in terms of perceptual fixity-mobility using a "free" Rod-and-Frame Test, were investigated regarding their interpretations of a nonfigurative stimulus shown repetitively at short exposure-times, and their characterization of two pictures each portraying two soldiers in intensive interaction--one man apparently attacking the other in the first picture and apparently rescuing or taking care of the other man in the second. Mobile subjects on the free Rod-and-Frame Test reported a larger number of different interpretations of the nonfigurative stimulus and construed it more frequently in terms of human themes than did the fixed subjects; in rating the pictures of soldiers, they used more extreme and complex characteristics. It appeared that, when confronted with ambiguous stimuli, the mobile individual moves both "horizontally", as it were, along the surface of objective reality, and "vertically", from present to past realities, thus conjoining subjective-emotional and objective-analytic aspects of perception. This interpretation agrees with Werner's model of mobility-fixity which implies that the mobile individual operates on different developmental levels of perceptual functioning.