topics: |  psychology | perception |

An acerbic, but interesting read on processes in perception.

Excerpts : ch.5 Picture Perception Across Cultures and Species

Deregowski reported that some of his subjects expected job opportunities to hinge on the result of his little tests.

Nadel (1937), in a careful study,showed that Nigerian peoples, with very different kinds of cultures, had little difficulty with photographs. His Yoruba subjects enjoyed a culture that was rich in the use of wooden images and hand-made pictures. The Nube's art was "imageless" in the sense that it was decorative and ornamental, oriented toward design and not depiction. (The Yoruba and Nube lived in adjoining regions with comparable climatic and geographical conditions.)

So far as identification of men and animals in photographs was concerned, the people gave like results. Even a photograph of a bush fire, which was dark and indistinct, says Nadel, gave no trouble. Where the people differed was in terms of interpretative comments-for example, how the subject might have come to be where he was shown to be, or what he might be intending to do.

Pitfalls in Cross-Cultural Research

If photographs [are effective] as representations,  even for the
most unschooled, one might still wonder if line drawings raise special
difficulty. Outline depiction leaves out so much and asks us to accept a thin
strip of black ink as a corner of, say, a room. Surely we have to be taught
about outline drawing.

William Hudson (1960) used line drawings (below) to test many different
groups of subjects in South Africa. Some of his subjects were white, some
were black, some were illiterate, some educated or attending school. He found
that the animals and humans in the pictures were all fairly consistently
identified by all subjects, in all of his various groups. No subject ever
called the outlined man an elephant, and no subject ever called the outlined
elephant a man.


 
   "What is the man doing?"  Some subjects in Zambia felt that the man
   was aiming the spear at the elephant, but that this was not realistic
   since a human would not normally spear an elephant.  
   Depth cues were apparently being disregarded by many, particularly the
   children. 


Beside the animal and human objects, there were in some drawings occasional
sketchy lines, to depict a hill, if curved, or the horizon, if flat, and a
pair of converging lines were sometimes pres-ent to represent a
road. Hudson-(1960) wanted to know whether perspective cues, like the
convergence of the lines intended as the edges of a road, would be meaningful
to his subjects. Many of his white subjects took the lines to be a road, many
of his black subjects took the lines to be spears or a hole. (He reported
these details in his 1967 paper.) Since the drawings were sketchy and
ambiguous, the question of the meaning of perspective is not fairly tackled
by Hudson's study.  At least each of the referents mentioned by the black
subjects seems quite valid to Western eyes, when the referent is
mentioned. The important fact to note is that the lines were not meaningless
daubs.

The false expectations trap in cross-cultural studies

It is not surprising that many of Hudson's subjects seemed to base their
replies to his question on logical argument, avoiding relying on weak
perceptual cues. For example, some subjects argued that a man would not
attack an elephant with a spear, so if the man in a picture was throwing a
spear, it must be at the antelope, not the elephant in the picture. Some
subjects told Hudson, flatly, that the pictures were ambiguous.

If he wanted to question them about the pictures, the subjects said, he
should tell them which view they should take.

Hudson did not discuss the sophistication of his subjects with tests. He did
not say whether his subjects were all equally at ease. But surely when a white
man pulls a black laborer away from his daily work and sits down in an office
with the laborer, and begins to show the laborer little pictures, the laborer
begins to feel a little anxious. Especially when the setting is South Africa,
the laborer must be uncomfortable. To make matters worse, the white man waits
unhelpfully through long periods without deigning to assist the laborer in
answering the odd questions the white man is asking.

Hudson reports that at times the response was given by thesubject after a
lag of one hour! What fears were in the laborers' minds we can only guess
at. p.73

Deregowski reported that some of his subjects expected job opportunities to
hinge on the result of his little tests. How can one expect subjects to
behave calmly, at their best, when they are ap-prehensive (and possibly
incredulous) at the kinds of questions being asked? p.74

Deregowski's study also warns us against facile interpretations of drawing
practices. Hudson, for example, proposed that the "unacculturated black man"
who draws both sideand front views in one drawing is drawing
something phylogenetically and onto genetically primitive. p.76

Links: http://www.simplypsychology.org/perceptual-set.html