A light-activated scheduling system for complex visual discrimination training.

A very early student project undertaken by Friedrich Hegelmaier (1833-1906), published in German in 1852, is republished in English translation. Slight though the experimental work is, it nevertheless occupies a unique place in the history of experimental psychology. It is the source whence Fechner had the method of constant stimuli, a method that continued in use as the preferred psychophysical method, substantially in the form described here, for more than a century. The experiment is arguably the first experiment in the modern sense of a systematic preplanned body of observations and has the glaring faults that one would expect in a very first experiment. Finally, Hegelmaier suggests the use of two simultaneous tasks as a means to investigate human performance, a full hundred years before that idea was realized in practice. If only he had continued in experimental psychology!

Discrimination Learning↗

PubMed1992

The effects of Kanji attributes on visual field differences: examination with lexical decision, naming and semantic classification tasks.

Using three experimental tasks (lexical decision, naming and semantic classification), the relative contribution of various Kanji attributes in left and right visual field recognition was examined. The results showed that first, factors contributing to the left visual field processing of Kanji differed depending on the level of processing; second, in an early stage of processing, perceptual attributes such as the number of strokes was a strong contributing factor; and third, in a later stage both perceptual- and imagery-related attributes contributed strongly to left visual field or right hemisphere processing.

Discrimination Learning↗

PubMed1992

[Localization disorders in squint amblyopia: horizontal line bisection and relative vertical localization].

We used two different procedures for the evaluation of spatial localization errors in strabismic and anisometropic amblyopes, strabismic alternators and normal control subjects: partitioning of horizontal lines and vertical alignment. We found defective spatial localization in the amblyopic eyes of squinters with both procedures. However, in the horizontal partitioning experiment, the control subjects also showed asymmetries between the two hemifields. Thus, there is no good baseline under these conditions for the results of the amblyopic eyes of squinters. Our results show that vertical alignment is the more appropriate procedure to quantify defective spatial localization in strabismic amblyopes.

Discrimination Learning↗