Believing is seeing

First Foundation: ‘Believing is seeing': Brunner and Postman's Experiment

I perceive you are puzzled and in doubt.  You wish to raise an objection.  You were taught and you believe that: seeing is believing.  What is all this nonsense?  It should be the other way around.  You have come to understand that metaphorically speaking the eye is a camera that passively collects light and brings it in to record photographs of what is actually out there.  There is no alteration of the sense data going on.

What I am proposing is that in actuality the reverse of that simple phrase is true.  It is more like believing is seeing.  What I am proposing is that the eye is a camera that filters out most of the electromagnetic spectrum to only record visible light, and that significantly the camera is controlled by photographer who chooses consciously or unconsciously what to photograph.  Lastly, and most significantly of all, metaphorically speaking there is upon the lens of the camera a filter inherited by the photographer.  The photographer will spend her whole life adjusting its qualities and hence its effects.

A recounting of Jerome S. Brunner and Leo Postman's experiment will illustrate how this can be so.  Thomas Kuhn, in his seminal book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions refers to this experiment as one ‘that deserves to be far better known outside the trade,[1]'

The results of the experiment conducted by Bruner and Postman of Harvard University were published in The Journal of Personality in 1949[2].  The experiment was conducted with twenty-eight student volunteers from Harvard and Radcliff.  These student volunteers were shown a series of five different playing cards projected by a tachistoscope, which is a device that can expose to the eye an image for a set time measurable in milliseconds.  The exposure times used in the experiment started with 10 ms., then progressed as follows: 30 ms., 50 ms., 70 ms., 100 ms., 150 ms., 200 ms., 250 ms., 300 ms., 400 ms., 450 ms., 500 ms., 600 ms., 700 ms., 800 ms., 900 ms., and finally 1000 ms.   Each card was presented successively until correct recognition occurred, three times each at the varying exposure times.  If at 1000 milliseconds recognition did not occur, the next card was presented.  Correct recognition was two successive responses by the students of the identity of the card's actual color and shape.

The arrangement of five cards out of a total collection of ten was randomized into a series of fourteen possible patterns.   The ten total playing cards used in this experiment were the following.  One group was: the five of hearts, the ace of hearts, the five of spades, and the seven of spades.  Added to these cards were cards that had been altered by painting over the actual color with poster paint to make the black symbols appear red and the red symbols appear black.  These altered cards were: a black three of hearts, a black four of hearts, a red two of spades, a red six of spades, a black ace of diamonds, and a red six of clubs.  The students were asked to report everything they saw or thought they saw.

Now it had been demonstrated in other experiments using a tachistoscope that though we may claim that we cannot tell what it was that flash before our eyes in so brief a moment in time, we actually would accurately report what that object was when we are told to ‘guess'.  Our conscious mind requires a certain exposure time and duration to comfortably feel that accurate seeing has occurred.  It has been demonstrated that when we ‘guess' because we don't feel we have seen correctly, in actuality our ‘guess' is accurate and therefore demonstrating that our unconscious mental processes have indeed recorded the sensory impressions and recognized them, therefore enabling the conscious mind to say the guess.

If seeing were truly believing then the students would have been able to correctly identify all the cards.  Having been shown the card they should have been able to describe what they saw.  They would have ‘guessed' each card at each of the time exposures.  But this is not what occurred.  The students were able to ‘guess', recognize and describe, only the normal cards.  They had difficulties with the altered cards.  ‘The reader will note that even at the longest exposure used, 1000 ms., only 89.7 per cent of the incongruous cards had been correctly recognized, while 100 per cent of the normal cards had been recognized by 350 milliseconds.'[3]  While the experimental results recorded that correct guessing for normal cards did occur with some students as low as 10 and 30 milliseconds, correct guessing for the altered cards occurred for some students at 100 or 150 milliseconds, which is at least a fourfold increase in the time needed to recognize correctly the alteration done to the cards.

What the student subjects reported was the fact that they unconsciously denied what their physiology, the eye and the visual system, and hence their sub-conscious was actually accurately presenting to them.  They were unconsciously choosing to guess wrongly by denying the thought that was trying to become conscious when confronted by an anomalous card.  They denied what it was they were seeing on the basis of an A Priori belief[4].  They expected to see something: red diamonds, red hearts, black spades and black clubs, and so confronted with something that contradicted those expectations: black diamonds, black hearts, red spades or red clubs, they denied the contradictory reality.

‘Our design was such that we might test the hypothesis that the more experience a subject had had in the past with incongruity, the less difficulty would he have in recognizing incongruity of a related nature.  Indeed, this is tantamount to saying that when one has experienced an incongruity often enough it cease to violate expectancy and hence ceases to be incongruous.'[5]

‘Generally speaking there appears to be four kinds of reaction to rapidly presented incongruities.  The first of these, we have called the dominance reaction.  It consists, essentially, of a "perceptual denial" of the incongruous elements in the stimulus patterns.'[6]  ‘A first datum is that 27 out of our 28 subjects showed dominance responses to the trick cards in their records, some considerably more than others.'[7]  ‘An incongruous stimulus was rendered congruent with expectancy by the operation of either form or color dominance.'[8]

Meaning that upon seeing the trick card, which, for example, was a black four of hearts, a student described the card by focusing either on the color, thus describing the card as a black four of spades, or by focusing on the form, thus describing the card as a four of hearts in the normal red color.  The student observer forced the incongruent card into a congruent pattern making the observation to conform either by color dominance as the key or by shape dominance as the key.

‘Once there had occurred in these cases a partial confirmation of the hypothesis that the card in the tachistoscope was a black club or black spade, it seemed that nothing could change the subject's report.  One subject gave 24 successive black color-dominant responses to the black three of hearts, another 44 of them (both calling it the three of spades).  Another persisted for 16 trails in calling it a red three of hearts.  There were six instances in which subjects persisted in a color or form dominance response for over 50 exposures up to 1000 milliseconds, finally failing to recognize the card correctly.'[9]

‘A second technique of dealing with incongruous stimuli we have called compromise.'[10]  The observations of the students reporting compromise effects occur in their describing the anomalous colored cards as being neither red nor black but some color which was a imagined blend somehow of the two.

‘A third reaction may be called disruption.  A subject fails to achieve a perceptual organization at the level of coherence normally attained by him at a given exposure level. ..."I don't know what the hell it is now, not even sure whether it's a playing card," said one frustrated subject after an exposure well above his normal threshold.'[11]

After repeated exposures of the anomalous card the observer loses confidence in what he was seeing and becomes so frustrated that he is no longer sure in any way what he has just seen.

‘I can't make the suit out, whatever it is.  It didn't even look like a card that time.  I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or heart.  I'm not even sure what a spade looks like!  My God!'[12]  [This was what was reported by their most extremely disrupted observer at 300 ms in response to the confrontation of seeing a red spade.]

Some individuals eventually do recognize a sense of newness.  These individuals have a willingness to doubt their own prior beliefs.  I believe that ‘truth' for these individuals is a coherent match between external facts and internal facts and beliefs.  These individuals put a premium on coherent matching with the external.  For them, in the end, seeing is believing.  In the end they want to believe only that which they can confirm, and that which conforms, to some external source.

For these but not all students: ‘Finally, there is recognition of incongruity.'[13]  ‘Good Lord, what have I been saying?  That's a red six of spades.'[14]  ‘The uncertainty that sometimes comes before, the "sense of wrongness", the disruptions - all these point to the gradual weakening of previous hypotheses before "sudden reorganization" can occur...A subject viewing a red spade may start by reporting a red tint which gradually becomes redder on succeeding trials until he finally asserts that the card is a red spade.'[15]

These students doubt themselves, doubt their own beliefs and are thus open to the new, to the anomalous - that which seems to contradict a previously held and accepted belief.  Once this anomalous sense data is recognized and understood, it ceases to be an anomaly.  It becomes incorporated into what is possible and thus is no longer a thing of chaos and confusion but a thing of coherence and order - it has altered and expanded the previously held beliefs.  The lenses of their sunglasses have been changed.

‘Our major conclusion is...perceptual organization is powerfully determined by expectations built upon past commerce with the environment.  When such expectations are violated by the environment, the perceiver's behavior can be described as resistance to the recognition of the unexpected or incongruous.[16]

'

‘When these responses fail and when correct recognition does not occur, what results may best be described as perceptual disruption.  Correct recognition itself results when inappropriate expectancies are discarded after failure of confirmation.'[17]

Let us review the process of perception and understanding so that Brunner and Postman's experiment makes sense.  For the test subjects to fail to perceive the anomalous cards, the following model seems to be descriptively accurate.  The sense data comes in, photons reach the eye and sound waves reach the ears.  Then that incoming data is sent into the brain where it must then be examined and checked against a set of stored information prior to the act of conscious comprehension.  That stored data is our memory of prior experience.  Now if that new sense data was unaffected by prior beliefs then, in the playing card experiment, a simple process of color matching and shape matching is all that would be needed for the subject to realize the anomalous cards were simply new combination of elements made up of color and shape.  The Black Diamond would quickly be recognized by its color and shape.  But, this did not occur.  Therefore the process of perception is not exclusively one of examining new sense data as being composed of pristine elements of a purely sensory nature.  The process of perception involves analyzing the sense data with regards to some data previously stored in the brain, and this prior data can be controlling in determining what is considered ‘real' or ‘valid'.

The sense data comes in and the brain/mind must be searching to place it in a category, this is this the act of checking the sense data's raw information concerning it's color and shape, and to place the components, the parts in some category context of a whole unit to determine what the total object made up of all its component sensory data is to be considered.  The brain/mind searches and finds how to classify the whole contextual collection of sense data based on the past memory.  The brain/mind comes back with the category information and concludes that what is being shone is a whole unit called a ‘playing card'.   This process of comparison of the new data to the prior data of categories is done and it is then recalled on the basis of prior stored information such as what are the possible part categories of shape and color that are used in the context of the whole unit classification scheme of what constitutes a ‘playing card'.  It is important to note that once the category of the prior belief is accepted then the current sense data is matched against the prior memory of patterns of color and shape arrangements of playing cards to determine validity of the incoming sense data.  This is when the incoming data could be, and with many of the subject, is rejected.  The sense data is rejected because it fails to conform to the factors that make up the definition of the whole unit category in question.

In this experiment the whole unit contextual category was ‘Playing Cards' and for that whole unit definition of a Playing Cards there are only four Suits made up of a fixed set of combinations of the parts that correspond to shapes and colors: Spades are black, Hearts are red, Diamonds are red and Clubs are black.

The purposely made anomalous cards and their sensory data are found to contradict the prior acceptable collection of whole unit patterns which make up the definition of whole unit things in that category.  According to the prior data, the prior beliefs, the component parts of the whole unit category of ‘Playing Cards' is fixed and limited and this new collection of sense data, this part combination of black with the Diamond shape is not amongst the pre-existing possible combination patterns.  Hence for many of the students it is rejected.

The actual sense data from the anomalous playing cards if present in another whole unit context would presumably not have been rejected, since the raw uncategorized sense data was accurate.  The color in another context, if it were presented as a blotch of color alone, would have been accepted as valid and recognized as being the color black, and the shape presented as a form alone and not in the context of being found in the whole unit of a playing card would presumably also have been accepted as valid and would have been recognized.  But it was that the sense data confirmed that the patterns of color and shape were combined in the form of the whole unit category of ‘Playing Cards' and this determined how the component parts of the data was to be treated.

For must of the students, once that whole unit pattern was recognized it becomes the test for the validity of the incoming data.  The belief in the prior whole unit pattern forces the actual sense data to be challenged.  The whole unit pattern determined that it was ‘impossible' for those colors to be matched to those shapes and thus the sense data must be wrong.  The prior pattern was assumed as perfect and accurate.  The assumption was that incoming sense data concerning the nature of the component parts could be wrong.  When in actuality it was the assumptions about what is considered possible, the pattern/belief, that was incorrect and mistaken.

Brunner writes that the above is an accurate description of the process of perception in another article written in 1957 reviewing the prior year's research into the process of perception.[18]

‘Perception involves an act of categorization.  Put in terms of the antecedent and subsequent conditions from which we make our inferences, we stimulate an organism with some appropriate input and he responds by referring the input to come class of things or events...'[19]

‘On the basis of certain defining or critical attributes in the input, what are usually called cues although they should be called clues, there is a selective placing of the input in one category rather than another. ...The use of cues in inferring the categorical identity of a perceived object...is as much a feature of perception as the sensory stuff from which percepts are made.  What is interesting about the nature of the inference from cue to identity in perception is that it is in no sense different from other kinds of categorical inferences based on defining attributes.'[20]

Note that Brunner is stating the following: that this sense data process goes from examining incoming data to check against past categories then, finding a possible match to the category, re-examines the data to determine if it indeed fits the definition of what constitutes and makes up the elements of, and units of, that category, and on this basis of a match to the pre-existing category, the incoming data will be accepted or rejected.

‘So, at the outset, it is evident, that one of the principal characteristics of perceiving is a characteristic of cognition generally.  There is no reason to assume that the laws governing inferences of this kind are discontinuous as one moves form perceptual to more conceptual activities.'[21]

Brunner is saying that the process of perception is a model for categorical inferences in rational thought.  This biological process is the a-prior model for rational thinking based upon the use of inferences and categories.

‘The rather bold assumption that we shall make at the outset is that all perceptual experience is necessarily the end product of a categorization process.  ...all perception is generic in the sense that whatever is perceived is placed in and achieves its "meaning" from a class of percepts with which it is grouped.'[22]

(You should note that the significance of the following two statements by Brunner becomes clearer when we discuss the experiences of Mystic/Prophets later in this book, for now I shall present the statement to tease your imagination.)

‘To be sure, in each thing we encounter, there is an aspect of uniqueness, but the uniqueness inheres in deviation from the class to which an object is "assigned".'[23]

‘More serious...is the question of how one could communicate or make public the presence of a nongeneric or completely unique perceptual experience.  Neither language nor the tuning that one could give an organism to direct any other form of overt response could provide an account, save in generic or categorical terms.  If perceptual experience is ever had raw, i.e., free of categorical identity, it is doomed to be a gem serene, locked in the silence of private experience.'[24])

These conclusions, about categorization as a necessary part of perception and comprehension of the sense data being perceived, are not something that are old fashion and that more recent investigation has over turned, no indeed.  The work of Brunner and Postman is still valid and acceptable science.  To demonstrate this I will cite the 1997 book by Steven Pinker: How the Mind Works.[25]

‘Experiments in cognitive psychology have shown that people are bigots about birds, other animals, vegetables, and tools.  People share a stereotype, project it to all members of a category, recognize the stereotype more quickly than the nonconformists, and even claim to have seen the stereotype when all they really saw were examples similar to it.'[26]

Those last few words seem to be alluding to the experimental results of Brunner and Postman, the test subjects claimed to see the stereotype, what they expected, and denied the actual anomalous sense data.

Pinker goes on to say: ‘People think in two modes.  They can form fuzzy stereotypes by uninsightfully soaking up correlations among properties, taking advantages of the fact that things in the world tend to fall into clusters...But people can also create systems of rules - intuitive theories - that define categories in terms of the rules that apply to them, and that treat all members of the category equally.'[27]

Pinker further remarks, and in doing so presents the primary thesis of this book that you are now reading,: ‘In his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, named after a fuzzy grammatical category in an Australian language, the linguist George Lakoff argues that pristine categories are fictions.  They are artifacts of the bad habit of seeking definitions, a habit we inherited from Aristotle and now must shake off.'[28]

Pinker is offering what I would classify as a possible continuum of people and their thinking.  At one end are those who accept, allow and utilize ‘fuzzy stereotypes' - fuzzy categories with open-ended, ambiguous rules for the definition of what can be a member of that category and at the other end are those who only accept fixed clear categories with clear and unambiguous defining characteristics that determine what is or is not a member of that category.  At one end of the continuum is Aristotelian logic, which is built upon the fixed clear and unambiguous defining characteristics of a category.  At the other end of the continuum is Non-Aristotelian logic that accepts and acknowledges the existence of fuzzy categories.

This is what I meant when I boldly said that the conscious mind operates on the principle of believing is seeing.  We see what we expected to see on the basis of our previously held ideas, values and beliefs.   The brain process the information accurately up to a point, that point is when the incoming sense data begins the next stage which is interpreting the data, the process of putting into words what was previously seen.  At this stage the observer's expectations becomes important and it is possible that the expectations will over rule and distort the input of the senses.  At this stage there can become the refusal to acknowledge the possibility that something completely new is being seen, something that contradicts the previous expectation.  The more strongly held is the expectation based upon this prior belief, the powerful will be the resistance and denial of anything seen or heard that contradicts that prior belief.

Let me repeat this most important conclusion: beliefs have power.  Beliefs have the power to affect the mind's ability to accurately interpret incoming sense data.  The stronger the beliefs, the stronger the convictions, the more resistant those beliefs will be to being challenged by incoming sense data of any kind.  Those strongly held beliefs will fight off any incoming sense data that appears to, and attempts to, contradict those prior beliefs.

The more committed you are to a belief the more powerfully you will resist having that belief challenged by incoming sense data.  You will ignore, discount and distort that incoming sense data.  The ideas that you come to believe in shape you and the world you live in, the world you perceive.  The ideas that you come to believe define the world that you believe you live in and amongst.  For you, the world of reality becomes the world formed out of your prior beliefs.  The two are equivalent.

Brunner and Postman's experiment demonstrates the validity of my first principle of humanly constructed reality: People are shaped by ideas.

[1] Kuhn, pg. 62.

[2] J. S. Bruner and L. Postman, On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm, The Journal of Personality, vol. 18, 1949, pp. 206 - 223.  This article can be found on the Web at: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Bruner/Cards/

[3] Pg. 211 of Bruner and Postman.

[4] I believe that all A Priori concepts, ideas, beliefs, come out of our bodies processes.  We humans extrapolate and project out into the External World the body's processes.  The A Priori notions of Space, Time, Cause and Effect, etc. are all derived from a recognition, whether conscious or not, of how our body appears to actually work. Our body is the primal model; the primal font of metaphors, for what is real.

[5] Pg. 211 of Bruner and Postman.

[6] Pg 213 of Bruner and Postman.

[7] Pg. 214 of Bruner and Postman.

[8] Pg. 215 of Bruner and Postman.

[9] Pg 221 of Bruner and Postman.

[10] Pg. 213 of Bruner and Postman

[11] Pg. 214 of Bruner and Postman

[12] pg. 218 of Bruner and Postman

[13] pg 214 of Bruner and Postman

[14] pg. 222 of Bruner and Postman

[15] pg. 222 of Brunner and Postman.

[16] pg. 222 of Bruner and Postman

[17] pp. 222-3 of Bruner and Postman

[18] Jerome S. Brunner, Psychological Review, Vol. 64, No. 2, 1957, ‘On Perceptual Readiness, pp 123 - 152.

[19] Brunner, pg. 123.

[20] Brunner, pg. 123

[21] Brunner, pp 123-4.

[22] Brunner, pg. 124

[23] Brunner, pg. 124

[24] Brunner, pg. 125.

[25] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1997.

[26] Pinker, pg.126.

[27] Pinker, pg. 127

[28] Pinker, pg.311.