Volume 16, Number 7 · April 22, 1971
The Eyes Have It
By D.W. Harding
The Measurement of Sensation: A Critique of Perceptual Psychophysics
by C. Wade Savage
University of California, 590 pp., $15.00
Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception: 1650-1950
by Nicholas Pastore
Oxford, 464 pp., $10.00
The Intelligent Eye
by R.L. Gregory
McGraw-Hill, 191 pp., $7.95
Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing
by R.L. Gregory
McGraw-Hill, 303 pp., $2.45 (paper)
The World Through Blunted Sight
by Patrick Trevor-Roper
Bobbs-Merrill, 191 pp., $12.50
If any part of psychology has enjoyed undisputed respectability it is the ritual of getting people to lift two small weights one after the other and say whether the second is heavier or lighter than the first. Or they can watch lights or listen to tones and make a judgment of relative brightness or loudness. Endless man-hours have been spent in these devoted exercises, all supposedly establishing numerical relations between physical dimensions like the amplitude of sound waves and sensory or psychological dimensions like loudness. As an impatient undergraduate putting in my stint on the treadmill, I comforted myself with the belief that this activity was a vestige, a hangover from the nineteenth century, soon to be displaced by real psychology. Today it still flourishes, claiming notable advances in method, statistical elaboration, and conceptual sophistication.
Review, 3003 words
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