Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to C J Overbeeke.
This article reports an experiment on expressing the behavioural meaning of designed objects. Can a designer express the taste of a desert in the form of its packaging and can consumers match these forms when tasting the desserts? Analysis of responses of 12 adults indicates positive answers to these questions.
This article describes three experiments on the possibility of expressing scent or sound into visual forms made by design engineering students. The hypothesis tested was that people are able to pick up patterns in the energy flow that the students transposed from one perceptual sense to another. In Exp. 1 subjects were given different scents and were asked to choose a sculpture designed according these scents. In Exp. 2 subjects were given different musical pieces and asked to match them with portable cassette players designed according to this music. Exp. 3 was identical to Exp. 2 but different music selections, similar to the ones in Exp. 2, were used. In all three experiments subjects were indeed able to perform the tasks above chance level. Results are discussed within the framework of the theory of direct perception of Gibson.
The hypothesis was tested that the coupling of parallax shifts between objects depicted on a monitor screen around a fixation point with the head movements of an observer viewing this screen monocularly around a point coinciding with the fixation point is sufficient to create a convincing depth impression and to enable the observer to make reliable estimations of depth. The estimates were based on monocular vision and involved the aligning of wedges. The investigation consisted of two analogous experiments carried out simultaneously, one on depth estimations virtually in the screen and one on depth estimations virtually in front of the screen. In each experiment three conditions were compared: an active condition in which the coupling of parallax shifts and observer's head movements operated, a passive condition in which it did not, and a real-life set-up to measure the maximum reliability in depth estimation. The hypothesis is confirmed: in the active condition the variances in the alignments are significantly smaller than in the passive condition and approach those in the real-life set-up. This holds not only for estimates in the screen but also for estimates in front of the screen, that is, we can make a thing apparently leap out of the screen towards the observer. Results are interpreted against the background of the debate between the direct and the indirect theories of perception.
Profiles designed by Pittenger and Shaw were used in a tachistoscopic experiment. Subjects were asked to make estimates of age of a profile of a 10-yr.-old boy preceded subliminally by an older (old group) or younger (young group) profile or by a blank card (control group). Results show the mean estimate of the young group to be significantly smaller than that of the control group. The mean estimate of the old group was not significantly greater than that of the control group. The results are discussed in the framework of the debate on direct versus indirect perception. Marcel's 1983 data and the present results indicate that higher level perceptual processing (the perception of behavioral properties) can precede lower level perceptual processing (the perception of physical properties). By assuming that people do perceive directly the behavioral properties of an event, the direct approach avoids the danger of putting too much emphasis on intelligence in perception and at the same time avoids the homunculus trap.