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This is a collection of articles and research reports on the psychology of perception. The articles range over a considerable span of time and place, including—sometimes for the first time in English—such classical work as “Points and Lines as Stimuli” by K. Koffka, “The Modes of Appearance of Colours” by David Katz, and “Principles of Perceptual Organization”, by Max Wertheimer, beside the much more recent work of Frenkel-Brunswik, Witkin and many others.
The paper by Werner and Wapner—“Towards a General Theory of Perception” (1952)—may be singled out as particularly instructive, because it defines and explains the theoretical model of the modern researcher into perception. It describes what the authors call the modern “organismic theory”, a theory that takes into account the projective nature of perception, rejects the dichotomizing of such functions as emotions and motor and sensory activity, and deals instead with the organism as a whole. Basing their researches upon this general theoretical model, the authors have devised and tested various more specific and operational hypotheses; thus their theory of sensory-tonic vicariousness has led them to show that, after a period of physical movement, fewer movement responses are perceived on the Rorschach test; this then demonstrates that sensory-tonic activity may be released through either muscular or perceptual activity. Such an “organismic” frame of reference has guided many other recent investigations, such as those on the influence of culture on perception or those concerned with intolerance of perceptual ambiguity.
Those clinicians with a growing interest in the phenomenological rather than the interpretative study of schizophrenia, for example T. Freeman or R. D. Scott, who place the accent on ego functioning, may welcome a book that explores existing theoretical and research approaches to perception. Information theory, with its concept of “perceptual categorizing”, may widen understanding of the sort of world i