Effects of Practice and Rest on Fluctuations in the Müller–lyer Illusion
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9620404 |
|---|---|
| Authors | H J Eysenck (University of London), P Slater (University of London) |
| Year | 1958 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 246-256 |
| Publication date | 1958-08-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | British Journal of Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-1269 • E-ISSN: 2044-8295 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1958.tb00662.x |
| PMID | 13572796 |
| OpenAlex | W2093436104 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Fifty subjects are given sixty trials each with an apparatus exhibiting the Müller–Lyer illusion. The first forty trials (divided for analysis into four periods of ten) are uninterrupted; a 30 sec. pause for fixation is followed by a fifth period of ten trials; and a rest pause of 30 min. by a final period. On the group as a whole, practice produces scarcely any effect. The means differ very little from trial to trial from period to period, and the amount of variation about them tends to remain constant. The effect of the illusion varies greatly on different individuals. The variance between the subjects' means for the experiment as a whole constitutes 63% of the total. There are also striking differences in the effects of practice on different subjects; these person:period interactions account for another 14%. The error variance forms almost the whole of the remainder (22%). To classify the person:period interactions, a principal component analysis was employed. The first latent root, accounting for 59% of the variance due to interaction, describes a course of change which retains the same direction for any particular subject (whether upwards or downwards, towards or away from the point of zero illusion) up to the end of the fifth period but is reversed by the rest pause. The authors do not consider the terminology of satiation or improvement with practice suitable for describing the whole range of such phenomena, but suggest a description in terms of habit reinforcement. However, the phenomena exhibited by subsequent components, which cannot be neglected as statistically non‐significant, do not seem so explicable. All such performances constitute patterns of search, and it is noteworthy that none of them accord with the oscillatory pattern suggested by cybernetic theory. Scores on scales of neuroticism and extraversion‐introversion failed to correlate significantly with individual differences either in the effect of the illusion over the experiment as a whole or in the progressive changes induced by practice
Audiology · Cognitive psychology · Illusion · Period (music) · Reinforcement · Rest (music) · Statistics · Variance (accounting) · Mathematics · Neuroscience and Music Perception · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.05 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1961 - 2025 (65) |
| Highly cited | No |