An untrained eye: the tachistoscope and photographic vision in early experimental psychology

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Notes

1. Dearborn, The Psychology of Reading.

2. Daston and Galison, Objectivity.

3. Ruth Benschop, ‘What is a Tachistoscope?,’ points out that the function and design of the tachistoscope, like those of other scientific instruments, have been multifarious, changing as the device migrated from one set of scientific practices and purposes to another. For my purposes, I will focus on the tachistoscope’s function as a means of measuring visual perception and reaction times, but I do not mean to suggest that this is always or only what defines it.

4. Bloch, ‘Psychologie,’ 588. Cited in Canales, A Tenth of a Second, 79.

5. Volkmann first wrote about the tachistoscope in 1859, but as Benschop points out, he claimed to have been using it for several years beforehand. See Benschop, ‘What is a Tachistoscope?’, 27.

6. Volkmann proposed the tachistoscope as an alternative to similar apparatuses (used, for example, by von Helmholtz) that employed an electric spark to illuminate an exposure field in a darkened box. A sudden and dramatic change in lighting, he argued, made any measurements of instantaneous perception imprecise by overloading the eye with stimuli. The tachistoscope, in contrast, allowed for a much more controlled exposure that would only introduce minimal differences of stimuli into a subject’s visual field. See Benschop, ‘What is a Tachistoscope?’, 30; Volkmann, ‘Das Tachistosop’, 90.

7. Even in the nineteenth century, ostensibly the high-water mark of naïve belief in the veracity of photographs, the history of a photograph’s making was recognized as an important criterion of its truthfulness. As Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed, demonstrates, Victorians’ trust in a given photograph often depended on the social context of its production, distribution, and display, i.e. on an appraisal of the human agency involved.

8. Von Helmholtz, Science and Culture, 356.

9. Ibid, 355.

10. Ibid. In this regard, von Helmholtz’s epistemology bears some important traces of the ethos that Daston and Galison (Objectivity) call ‘selection,’ which was dominant in eighteenth-century scientific practice. Von Helmholtz’s epistemology was deeply indebted to the classicism that prevailed in eighteenth-century arts and science, as I explain below.

11. Lenoir, ‘The Eye as Mathematician’.

12. Von Helmholtz, Science and Culture, 355.

13. Hatfield, ‘Helmholtz and Classicism,’ 541–58.

14. Pater, The Renaissance.

15. Ibid, 152.

16. Peirce, ‘The Fixation of Belief.’

17. Ibid., 14. For an acknowledgement of Peirce’s debt to von Helmholtz by one of his contemporaries, see G. Stanley Hall’s ‘Philosophy in the United States,’ 102.

18. Thus by 1895, R. Meade Bache, ‘Reaction Time,’ could interpret the slower reaction-times of white experimental subjects compared to black and Native American subjects in his study as the expression of whites’ greater capacity for reflective and accurate understanding of the world. Similarly, the psychologist Joseph Jastrow argued that non-whites had less control over their perceptual habits and thus were more susceptible to illusions. For an account of Jastrow’s racialized psychology of deception that illustrates the changed attitude towards perceptual habit, see Pettit, ‘Joseph Jastrow’.

19. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 115–90.

20. In Daston and Galison’s terms, both mechanical objectivity and untrained judgment respond to a shift from conceiving of objects as types to conceiving of objects as particulars (see Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 161).

21. As described by Daston and Galison, Objectivity, trained judgment is, like von Helmholtz’s theory of unconscious inference, a mode of vision that has been so shaped by practice that the eye reflexively focalizes and interprets salient details without the scientist’s awareness or conscious direction. It is all the more striking then, that von Helmholtz appears only obliquely in Daston and Galison, Objectivity, featuring solely as one of Gottlob Frege’s empiricist enemies. Partly, this neglect stems from Daston and Galison’s focus on image-production in scientific atlases rather than, as Jennifer Tucker notes, image-reception and its attendant problems and questions (Tucker, ‘Objectivity, Collective Sight,’ 655). His absence also leaves uncomplicated the historical trajectory in Objectivity from mechanical objectivity in the nineteenth century to trained judgment in the twentieth.

22. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 38–9.

23. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.

24. Ibid., 184.

25. Cattell, ‘The Time it Takes.’

26. Cattell’s subjects recognized images and colors slightly faster than words, but took longer to name them (Cattell, ‘The Time it Takes’). The reason for his, he speculated, was that the association between the ‘idea’ or recognized image of a word and its name or audio-motor articulation occurs habitually enough to happen automatically, while to make such a link between a recognized image and its name requires voluntary effort.

27. Indeed, as Charles Acland, ‘The Swift View,’ chronicles, for almost the next century, the tachistocope would be popularly seen as a means of clocking and improving reading speeds.

28. Erdmann and Dodge, Psychologische Untersuchungen.

29. Hylan, ‘The Distribution of Attention.’

30. Tachistoscopy’s obsession with micro-managing the attention of experimental subjects – preventing eye-movements as well as excluding noises, lighting changes, any pretexts for distraction that might contaminate the single, pure instant of visual perception it sought to grasp – has been interpreted in scholarly literature as amounting to a kind of assault on the observer. Jonathan Crary, for example, characterizes late nineteenth-century tachistoscopy as ‘an instance of the production of “shock” as an integral part of the institutional determination of normative human behavior and response’ (Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 306). Friedrich Kittler goes much further. Characterizing the tachistoscope as ‘a typewriter whose type hits the retina,’ he describes experimental subjects as ‘victims,’ ‘chained’ to the device and undergoing ‘torment,’ and this despite the fact that these subjects were often the experimenters themselves (Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 222–3, 252). These accounts correctly identify psychologists’ interest in enforcing certain kinds of passivity during the viewing act, but that enforced passivity was designed merely as a means of throwing into relief what was really at issue in these experiments: the precise form of the perceiving subject’s agency.

31. Wundt, Grundzüge, 85–92, Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 291, used for trans.)

32. Wundt argues for this classification of fixed and roving attention in a new chapter added to the sixth edition of his Gründzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, among other places (see Scheerer, ‘Early German Approaches,’ 117–21). It was widely accepted by other psychologists (see Zeitler, ‘Tachistoskopische Versuche,’ Messmer, Zur Psychologie des Lesens Cameron, ‘Psychology of Reading,’ and Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests).

33. Wundt, The Outlines of Psychology, 233.

34. Psychologists did not necessarily see these processes as mutually exclusive. Zeitler, for instance, argued that reading begins apperceptively, but becomes assimilative once a subject has apperceived a proportion of letter-complexes sufficient to fill in the rest of the word.

35. See, for example, Messmer, Zur Psychologie des Lesens as well as Dodge, ‘The Psychology of Reading,’ 58, and Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests, 241.

36. Wundt, The Outlines of Psychology, 223.

37. Scheerer, ‘Early German Approaches,’ 119.

38. Noting that the rate at which a subject could perceive words depended on his familiarity with the language the words belonged to, Cattell had suggested that teachers could use tachistoscopic exposures to test students’ proficiency in foreign languages (Cattell, ‘The Time it Takes,’ 65).

39. For a history of the problems presented by durations of a tenth of a second or less within astronomy, psychology, physics, and other sciences in the nineteenth century, see Canales, A Tenth of a Second.

40. Becher, Experimentelle und kritische Beiträge

41. Hylan, ‘The Distribution of Attention.’

42. Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests, 238. Following Oskar Messmer, Zur Psychologie des Lesens, the distinction between subjective and objective reading survived as a way of loosely differentiating those subjects who perceived more and longer words with less precision and those who perceived fewer and shorter words with more accuracy. Dearborn, The Psychology of Reading, for example, used the same distinction between different individuals’ modes of reading, though he did not follow Messmer in referring to the two modes as objective and subjective.

43. Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology.

44. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Iskusstvo kak priyom,’ transposes modes of objective and subjective reading to modes of language, which he divides into the poetic and the prosaic. Like objective reading, poetic language works to ‘deautomize’ perception so that its objects can be seen anew. The untrained judgment of objective reading thus lies at the origins of Shklovsky’s influential concept of ‘defamiliarization.’

45. Zeitler, ‘Tachistoskopische Versuche.’

46. Dodge, ‘The Psychology of Reading,’ 58.