What becomes of the input from the stimulus?1

Abstract

Early behavionsts, troubled about introspection as an appropnate method for psychology, tried to get around the problem of awareness by dealmg only with discnmmation. Thus the "scientific" problem of perception rested for them upon the correlation between stimulus and response mdicated m the act of discnmmatmg, 1 e, respondmg differently to the presence or absence of stimulation or m the presence of two unlike stimuh Awareness, -hewever, has another facet the subject's awareness that he is discnmmatmg This is a puzzhng problem m any case, no matter what one's relation to behaviorism A sophisticated objectivism, m the form of operatiomsm, is free to deal with this problem through convergmg operations (Gamer, Hake, & Enksen, 1956), but this^freedom to work on the problem does not make its solution any easierThe facts of perception force a few simple conclusions upon the mvestigator (a) that much perception is highly correlated with the external stimulus, le, corresponds to reahty, (b) that some perceptions which appear to be realistic are m fact distorted m one way or another, based on stimulus charactenstics or on the subject's expectations, needs, wishes, or cogmtive styles, and (c) that there are some perception-hke cogmtive expenences^ that bear very httle relation to external stimuh, and seem to reflect largely some kind of "state" of the person, as m dreams, hallucmauons, and depersonalization. Expenmental psychologists have dealt very largely with the fijst of these three sets of facts, somewhat with the 'The expenments on tachistoscopic perceptton referred to here were conducted m coUaboratioa with Judah Landes, and supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation to R R. Sears and E R Hilgard, which led to the establishment of the Laboratory of Human Development at Stanford * The word perception is usually confined to responses closely correlated with a presented stimulus, while cognition is a more general term which includes perception, judgment, imagery, and thought The boundaries of what should be called perceptual are not clear m marginal cases

Changes in the effects of a waking subliminal stimulus as a function of dreaming and nondreaming sleep.

“…The Poetzl method has stimulated much research and controversy concerning the existence of subliminal perception which has been reviewed by Fisher (1960). Since Fisher's review, more recent work by Shevrin and Luborsky (1961), Shevrin and Stross (1962), Giddan (1962), Hilgard (1962), Bevan (1964), and Spence (1964) has provided additional evidence, based on a variety of stimuli and experimental conditions, that a stimulus unavailable to report may nevertheless influence a wide range of responses.…”

Form recognition at brief durations as a function of adapting field and interval between stimulations.

“…Clinical and personality psychologists have been concerned with the first of these problems in attempting to substantiate their concepts of the unconscious. Experiments such as those of Shevrin and Luborsky (1958), Hilgard (1962), Klein, Spence, Holt, and Gourevitch (1958), and Goldstein and Barthol (1960), have attempted to show that stimulation that is unreported by the human S is nonetheless capable of changing or influencing subsequent behavior. As has been pointed out elsewhere (Eriksen, 1960(Eriksen, , 1962Johnson & Eriksen, 1961) these experiments in general have been too poorly controlled to shed much light on the basic question.…”

Role of fantasy in the Poetzl (emergence) phenomenon.

“…Numerous studies have substantiated PoetzPs (1960) original claim that unreported elements of marginal stimuli often emerge in the content of subsequent fantasy products of the perceiver. While PoetzPs "fantasy" medium constituted dream reports, the effect has been variously obtained with other types of dreamlike or fantasylike materials, including daydreams (Shevrin & Luborsky, 1958), free associations (Allers & Teler, 1960;Haber & Erdelyi, 1967;Hilgard, 1962), and doodles and imagery (Eagle, Wolitzky, & Klein, 1966;Fisher, 1956;Fisher & Paul, 1959;Fiss, Goldberg, & Klein, 1963;Giddan, 1967). The generated fantasy material is used, in effect, as a detection indicator-the phenomenon being denned by a difference in measured availability between intential recall and fantasy.…”

“…The use of two different indicators to define the phenomenon creates some problems of interpretation, however. Difficulties arise from the possibility that stimulus items appearing in fantasy may have emerged not as a consequence of perception-at any levelbut through chance (Johnson & Eriksen, 1961), or through contextual elaborations in fantasy of partially detected, and therefore only partially recalled, stimulus items (Hilgard, 1962;Johnson & Eriksen, 1961). Nevertheless, more recent studies that appear to cope with these problems (Eagle et al, 1966;Fiss et al, 1963;Giddan, 1967;Haber & Erdelyi, 1967) converge on the conclusion that at least some unrecalled elements from marginal inputs do indeed find their way into fantasy.…”