Module D

 Contents

	Task 1: Basics		Task 5: On Escher
	Task 2: Commitment to research		Task 6: An analysed smile
	Task 3: Who should we ask about hearing		Task 7: Recovery from blindness
	Task 4: Essay - Assignment 1

Task 1: Basics
Read Chapter 4 in Weiten and follow through with exercises in the study guide.

Return to Top

This extract is from Boring, E.G. (1950). A history of experimental psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Inc.

Meanwhile Henry Head (1861-1940), soon to be the renowned neurologist, had become interested in the effects of lesions in peripheral sensory nerves and associated Rivers with him in what later became the classical experiment which distinguished between protopathic and epicritic cutaneous sensibility. In 1903 Rivers had two nerves severed in his left forearm, so that he and Head could study returning sensibility in his hand and wrist as the nerves regenerated. They published with the surgeon, James Sherren, their first report in 1905, and then Head and Rivers together got out the long report in 1908, freeing Rivers at last to run off to Melanesia for more anthropologizing.

Also see Pat Barker's Regeneration. A novel about the First World War that has Rivers as a factional hero. Published by Penguin in 1992 and a Booker prizewinner. A good read.

Return to Top

In a sensitive essay William Noble asks us to reconsider our attitudes to sense- impaired people. This reading has been taken from McConkey, K.M., & Bond, N.W. (Eds.). (1991). Readings in Australian psychology. Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

This article is reproduced in the print copy of your workbook.

Return to Top

Return to Top

Psychology and painting

There has always been a trade between some sections of the arts (painting, sculpture) and philosophy, psychology (sensation, perception, central representation) and certain sciences (optics, neurology, computer). In respect of psychology there has been the key concern to understand the outside world and how it is represented internally in mind, which is somewhat the same problem that the realist painter has with the canvas.

The understanding of the painting puts the problem back one step but we can be impressed by how a painter solves (or not) the problems of representation. Photography threw a Spaniard (the phrase is John Lennon’s but I was thinking of Picasso) in the works, eventually, but there was much interest in perceptual processes especially by the impressionists as your text Weiten  (1998, 168 – 173) endeavours to explain. In my limited experience painters are very serious about the issue of representation and quite as serious as psychologists about trying to sort out the issues and probably have much to offer on the topic as arguably they themselves experiment perpetually with the problems. Certainly work on perspective, colour, punctuate nature of uptake, beauty, illusion of third dimensionality on a two dimensional surface and various other issues have been worked on and thought on long and hard.

The reading in your workbook (Teuber, 1974) looks more closely at Escher’s contribution to design. I imagine there would be debate about whether he is an artist though his work has attracted a lot of attention (See Escher artist or mathematician). Weiten emphasises his interest in the illusions (his later works) but the Teuber article emphasises the perceptual explorations of shape boundaries and the toggling (reversibility) between figure and ground. In some this figure and ground images are attached to other symbols such as angels (light) and devils (dark). Teuber locates influences from the Gestaltist school which theory predominated in the study of perception in the thirties when this earlier work of Escher was done. She makes a good argument that Escher was aware of the contemporary psych literature together with some maths, some insight into crystalography. (You might like to look at an Annotated Gallery of Escher which gives a brief account of the changes in Escher's works.)

Penrose (1988) explores the relationship between plane tiles (tessellations) and Lobachevskian (non-Euclidean) geometry where triangles can have less than 180 degrees when you add up the three angles. Post-Einstein relativity identifies Euclidean (parallel lines don't meet, squares, bisected angles, hypotenuses) as a best-fit geometry for our day-to-day world
 
You might like to visit one of the Maurits Cornelis Escher sites as well as reading the extract in the print copy of your workbook.

Penrose, R. (1989). The emperor’s new mind. London: Vintage.
Weiten, W. (1998). Psychology: Themes and variations. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Teuber, M.L. (1974). Sources of ambiguity in the prints of Maurits C. Escher. Scientific American. July, 125 -139.

Return to Top

This article is reproduced in the print copy of your workbook.

Return to Top

This article is reproduced in the print copy of your workbook.

            Return to Schedule