Sustained Attention to Science: A Tribute to the Life and Scholarship of Joel Warm.

OBJECTIVE: To provide an evaluative synthesis of the life and scientific contributions of the late Joel Warm. BACKGROUND: As the doyen of vigilance research, Joel Warm expanded our understanding and horizons concerning this critical response capacity. However, he also made widespread and profound contributions to many other areas of perception and applied psychology, as we elucidate here. METHOD: Using archival sources, personal histories, and analysis of extant literature documenting Warm's own productivity, we articulate his life in science. RESULTS: Our synthesis illustrates the continued, broad, influential, and expanding impact that one individual can exert on diverse fields of study. Whole bodies of understanding of human behavior have been illuminated by his exemplary career. APPLICATION: By understanding his path to success in applied experimental psychology, we anticipate that others will be motivated, inspired, and guided to replicate and even outstrip a lifetime of such seminal and influential contributions. The presence of individuals such as Warm serves as a primary motive in enhancing Humans Factors/Ergonomics Science.

Why the "stimulus-error" did not go away.

Psychologists in the early years of the discipline were much concerned with the stimulus-error. Roughly, this is the problem encountered in introspective experiments when subjects are liable to frame their perceptual reports in terms of what they know of the stimulus, instead of just drawing on their perceptual experiences as they are supposedly felt. "Introspectionist" psychologist E. B. Titchener and his student E. G. Boring both argued in the early 20th century that the stimulus-error is a serious methodological pit-fall. While many of the theoretical suppositions motivating Titchener and Boring have been unfashionable since the rise of behaviourism, the stimulus-error brings our attention to one matter of perennial importance to psychophysics and the psychology of perception. This is the fact that subjects are liable to give different kinds of perceptual reports in response to the same stimulus. I discuss attempts to control for variable reports in recent experimental work on colour and lightness constancy, and the disputes that have arisen over which kinds of reports are legitimate. Some contemporary psychologists do warn us against a stimulus-error, even though they do not use this terminology. I argue that concern over the stimulus-error is diagnostic of psychologists' deep theoretical commitments, such as their conception of sensation, or their demarcation of perception from cognition. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this debate to current philosophy of perception.

Schumann's wheel tachistoscope: its reconstruction and its operation.

In the fall and winter of 1910, Max Wertheimer (1880-1943) performed his famous experiments on perceived motion, published in 1912. Besides slider experiments he mainly used a wheel tachistoscope developed by Friedrich Schumann (1863-1940) at the end of the 19th century. The Adolf-Wuerth-Center for the History of Psychology has several wheel tachistoscopes in its collection of instruments. Their provenance can be traced back to the Institute of Psychology of the University of Frankfurt and the University of Zurich. It is very plausible that Wertheimer, who performed his experiments at the Frankfurt Institute, used one of them. But the wheel tachistoscope alone is not sufficient to reconstruct Wertheimer's original experiments. As always, the devil is in the details. Wertheimer's descriptions of the necessary accessories, a prism, a viewing device, and an electric motor to move the wheel, are rather sparse. This article describes the results of a search for traces in the literature, in archives, and in literary depositories to shed some light on Wertheimer's experimental equipment. As a result, it was possible to reconstruct the entire apparatus and to obtain the same optical impressions with the reconstructed devices as Wertheimer's observers reported. In addition, one of his results was replicated with new participants exactly 100 years after its first publication.

Fechner as a pioneering theorist of unconscious cognition.

Fechner remains virtually unknown for his psychological research on the unconscious. However, he was one of the most prominent theorists of unconscious cognition of the 19th century, in the context of the rise of scientific investigations on the unconscious in German psychology. In line with the models previously developed by Leibniz and Herbart, Fechner proposes an explanative system of unconscious phenomena based on a modular conception of the mind and on the idea of a functional dissociation between representational and attentional activity. For Fechner, the unconscious is a state of consciousness resulting from the isolation of representational activity from the rest of psychical life. Unconscious mental phenomena are unattended mental states that behave autonomously while remaining able to act on consciousness. This paper aims to revisit Fechner's contribution to the history of the unconscious, but also the theoretical significance of the Fechnerian unconscious vis-à-vis current research on the cognitive unconscious.

The Euclidean model of measurement in Fechner's psychophysics.

Historians acknowledge Euclid and Fechner, respectively, as the founders of classical geometry and classical psychophysics. At all times, their ideas have been reference points and have shared the same destiny of being criticized, corrected, and even radically rejected, in their theoretical and methodological aspects and in their epistemological value. According to a model of measurement of magnitudes which goes back to Euclid, Fechner (1860) developed a theory for psychical magnitudes that opened a lively debate among numerous scholars. Fechner's attempt to apply the model proposed by Euclid to subjective sensation magnitudes--and the debate that followed--generated ideas and concepts that were destined to have rich developments in the psychological and (more generally) scientific field of the twentieth century and that still animate current psychophysics.

Sensory studies, or when physics was psychophysics: Ernst Mach and physics between physiology and psychology, 1860-71.

This paper highlights the significance of sensory studies and psychophysical investigations of the relations between psychic and physical phenomena for our understanding of the development of the physics discipline, by examining aspects of research on sense perception, physiology, esthetics, and psychology in the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Wundt, and Ernst Mach between 1860 and 1871. It complements previous approaches oriented around research on vision, Fechner's psychophysics, or the founding of experimental psychology, by charting Mach's engagement with psychophysical experiments in particular. Examining Mach's study of the senses and esthetics, his changing attitudes toward the mechanical worldview and atomism, and his articulation of comparative understandings of sensual, geometrical, and physical spaces helps set Mach's emerging epistemological views in the context of his teaching and research. Mach complemented an analytic strategy focused on parallel psychic and physical dimensions of sensation, with a synthetic comparative approach - building analogies between the retina, the individual, and social life, and moving between abstract and sensual spaces. An examination of the broadly based critique that Mach articulated in his 1871 lecture on the conservation of work shows how his historical approach helped Mach cast what he now saw as a narrowly limiting emphasis on mechanics as a phase yet to be overcome.

Gustav Theodor Fechner: life and work in the mirror of his diary.

The diaries of Gustav Fechner reveal much about his motivations to develop the field of psychophysics, as well as some of the steps toward its formulation. Together with his publications on various subjects, the diaries show how psychophysics fits into Fechner's broader scientific program, illuminate his worldview, and reveal his hopes for acceptance of his work by his colleagues.

Fechner's "inner psychophysics".

Though psychologists are generally aware that Gustav Fechner introduced psychophysics and set down its essential methodology, most of them only know about the part that Fechner called "outer psychophysics." In his classic publication of 1860, Fechner insisted that "inner psychophysics" was more important, yet this aspect of Fechner's work failed to receive any attention. The article reviews Fechner's presentation of inner psychophysics and suggests reasons why that part of his work was neglected and has been forgotten.

The forgotten history of signal detection theory.

Signal detection theory is one of psychology's most well-known and influential theoretical frameworks. However, the conceptual hurdles that had to be overcome before the theory could finally emerge in its modern form in the early 1950s seem to have been largely forgotten. Here, I trace the origins of signal detection theory, beginning with Fechner's (1860/1966) Elements of Psychophysics. Over and above the Gaussian-based mathematical framework conceived by Fechner in 1860, nearly a century would pass before psychophysicists finally realized in 1953 that the distribution of sensations generated by neural noise falls above, not below, the threshold of conscious awareness. An extensive body of single-unit recording and neuroimaging research conducted since then supports the idea that sensory noise yields genuinely felt conscious sensations even in the complete absence of stimulation. That hard-to-come-by insight in 1953 led immediately to the notion of a movable decision criterion and to the methodology of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. Over the ensuing years, signal detection theory and ROC analysis have had an enormous impact on basic and applied science alike. Yet, in some quarters of our field, that fact appears to be virtually unknown. By tracing both its fascinating origins and its phenomenal impact, I hope to illustrate why no area of experimental psychology should ever be oblivious to signal detection theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Early alternative derivations of Fechner's law.

Historians of psychology, notably Boring, fostered Fechner's idea that Weber's law is the indispensable basis for the derivation of the logarithmic psychophysical law. However, it is shown here that Bernoulli in 1738 and Thurstone in 1931 derived the logarithmic law using principles other than Weber's law and that Fechner and Thurstone based their derivations on the principles originally employed by Bernoulli. It is concluded that awareness of researchers about Bernoulli's and Thurstone's derivations could expand the directions of research on the form of the psychophysical law. (c) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A tale of two psychologies: The Høffding-Lehmann controversy and the establishment of experimental psychology at the University of Copenhagen.

Alfred Lehmann (1858-1921) was the pioneer of experimental psychology in Denmark. He established a laboratory of psychophysics in Copenhagen in 1886 after spending a winter in Wundt's laboratory. Philosophical psychology had been taught for the better part of the nineteenth century at the University of Copenhagen and had enjoyed a positivistic turn with the philosophers Harald Høffding (1843-1931) and Kristian Kroman (1846-1925). Shortly after establishing his laboratory, Lehmann criticized Høffding's theory of "unmediated recognition," which led to a sharp dispute between them on the nature of recognition. It has been claimed that this was a direct cause of Lehmann's slow advance at the University of Copenhagen. Archival sources show that Høffding, though having a very different conception of psychology from Lehmann, was on most occasions supportive of Lehmann and thus played an important role in establishing experimental psychology at the University of Copenhagen. (c) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A Conversation with Jacob Nachmias.

We are sad to report that Professor Jacob (Jack) Nachmias passed away on March 2, 2019. Nachmias was born in Athens, Greece, on June 9, 1928. To escape the Nazis, he and his family came to the United States in 1939. He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University and then an MA from Swarthmore College, where he worked with Hans Wallach and Wolfgang Kohler; his PhD in Psychology was from Harvard University. Nachmias spent the majority of his career as a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He made fundamental contributions to our understanding of vision, most notably through the study of eye movements, the development of signal detection theory and forced-choice psychophysical methods, and the psychophysical characterization of spatial-frequency-selective visual channels. Nachmias' work was recognized by his election to the National Academy of Sciences and receipt of the Optical Society's Tillyer Award.

Charles "Erik" Eriksen (1923-2018).

A towering figure in experimental psychology, Charles W. Eriksen, passed away in February this year. "Erik" made extensive original and lasting contributions to both research methods and theories in several areas of psychology, especially involving visual information processing. His research exhibited consistent concerns with experimental methods for distinguishing among alternative explanations and distinguishing perception from behavior. Erik pioneered many research methods now in common use-including converging operations, visual search, rapid serial presentations, the stop-signal paradigm, temporal integration in form perception, spatial cues for guiding selective attention, and the flankers task. He also introduced and tested many theories of selective attention. Erik was the founding editor of Perception & Psychophysics, and served for 23 years as its principal editor. An impressive and unforgettable person, Erik was a compelling personification of "the greatest generation."

In honour of Lothar Spillmann - filling-in, wiggly lines, adaptation, and aftereffects.

I have studied a number of visual phenomena that Lothar Spillmann has already elucidated. These include: Neon spreading: when a small red cross is superimposed on intersecting black lines, the red cross seems to spread out into an illusory disk. Unlike the Hermann grid, neon spreading is relatively unaffected when the black lines are curved or wiggly. This suggests that the Hermann grid, but not neon spreading, involves long-range interactions. Neon spreading can be shown in random-dot patterns, even without intersections. It is strongest when the red crosses are equiluminous with the gray background. Adaptation, aftereffects, and filling-in: direct and induced aftereffects of color, motion, and dimming. Artificial scotomata and filling-in: the "dam" theory is false. Staring at wiggly lines or irregularly scattered dots makes them gradually appear straighter, or more regularly spaced. I present evidence that irregularity is actually a visual dimension to which the visual system can adapt. Conjectures on the nature of peripheral fading and of motion-induced blindness. Some failed experiments on correlated visual inputs and cortical plasticity.

From perceptive fields to Gestalt.

Studies on visual psychophysics and perception conducted in the Freiburg psychophysics laboratory during the last 35 years are reviewed. Many of these were inspired by single-cell neurophysiology in cat and monkey. The aim was to correlate perceptual phenomena and their effects to possible neuronal mechanisms from retina to visual cortex and beyond. Topics discussed include perceptive field organization, figure-ground segregation and grouping, fading and filling-in, and long-range color interaction. While some of these studies succeeded in linking perception to neuronal response patterns, others require further investigation. The task of probing the human brain with perceptual phenomena continues to be a challenge for the future.

Galileo's Dagger.

Galileo found that fine lines on a balance scale dazzled his eyes and were unreadable. So he used a grid of fine wires instead and ran his dagger across it, counting the number of auditory clicks. This is the first known experiment on sensory substitution.