Available evidence seems to indicate that illusion decrement represents reorganization of cognitive components involved in visual-geometric illusions. Observers viewed one of the two forms of the Mueller-Lyer illusion. containing differential opportunities for peripheral structural interactions, for a lO-min test session on each of 5 successive days. The magnitude of the distortion decreased to a different asymptotic level in each of the two configurations with the form, with more opportunity for structural interactions showing the higher asymptote. Thus, this asymptote probably represents the structural or physiological contribution to the illusory distortion.
Past research has distinguished between two alternative representational systems that are used in perceptual learning-distinctive features and schemas. This study examines the influence of short-term memory on the initial utility of these systems and the influence of long-term memory on retention of these forms of learning. All children received a pretraining, training, immediatetransfer, and delayed-transfer phase with a series of visual discrimination problems under a variety of training conditions. The results showed that neither short-nor long-term memory influenced the .pattern of learning. Distinctive-features training facilitated learning relative to a control group whether the discrimination problem required short-term memory (successive) or did not (simultaneous), and whether the facilitation was examined for the immediate-or delayed-transfer test. Schema learning never facilitated transfer performance. Some time ago, Pick (1965) considered two opposing hypotheses to account for the nature of learning during improvement in discrimination of letter-like forms in young children-a schema hypothesis and a distinctive-feature hypothesis.The schema hypothesis "is suggested in discussions of Bruner (1957aBruner ( , 1957b, Vernon (1952Vernon ( , 1955 and in a recent book on perceptual development by Solley and Murphy (1960). . . . According to this point of view, discrimination and identification involve matching sensory data or 'cues' about objects to prototypes or models of the objects which have been built up through repeated experience with the objects and 'stored' in memory. Improvement in discrimination would involve first constructing schemata or models of the objects to be discriminated, and then matching the sensory data to the models so as to identify them as We wish to thank the administrators, teachers, and students from the suburban Madison, Wisconsin schools who participated in this study. Thanks also go to Erich Labouvie and Robert Davidson who read and criticized an earlier version of this paper. This research satisfied some of the requirements for the master of science degree in educational psychology for the senior author.Requests for reprints should be sent to Steven
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