The Consistency and Reliability of Autokinetic Movement Responses of Children
Abstract
CHAPTER IINTRODUCTIONPerception has been a major field of inquiry in philosophy for centuries and in psychology for several decades. Theories and disputes have been numerous, as Boring (5) points out, since the day when Thomas Reid first insisted upon the distinction between sensation and perception in 1765 to the modern holistic and field theoretical approaches in the studies of personality (2, 31).Comparatively little study has been made, however, on perception of real movement. Movement did not seem to be a special problem in the early years of experimental psychology. If the object seen changes position, the necessary result must be that one sees movement. Only when psychologists found that the experience of the subject was not necessarily in agreement with the objective sensation did a problem arise which demanded explanation. Boring (5) says that the beginning of scientific interest in movement in general and apparent movement in particular arose with Purkinje's phenomenological description of seen and felt movement in giddiness in the 1820’s. The following thirty years became an era of popular scientific interest in the magic of illusions. It was the time when the stroboscope, stereoscope and kaleidoscope were invented. Experimental research began to seek an answer to the "why” and "how” of these phenomena. Apparent movement became one of the main fields of interest in Gestalt theories of perception, which emphasizes the interrelation of certain internal and external factors of organization in the perceptual acts of an individual.
Subject Area
Cognitive psychology|Social psychology
Recommended Citation
Geisser, John, "The Consistency and Reliability of Autokinetic Movement Responses of Children" (1958). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI28673337.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI28673337
