I've been working on my upcoming episode on the gestalt principles of perception and as I was doing so I thought it might not be too hard to put together a brief online experiment. When I taught research methods students would sometimes put together an experiment on perceptual set in which they would show subjects a series of pictures and then show them an ambiguous figure. The figure was the vague outline of an animal. The experimental group first saw pictures of animals while the control group saw non-animal pictures. The dependent variable was the number of subjects in each group who saw the animal in the ambiguous figure.
The experiment often didn't work because too few subjects in each group saw the animal. It was, after all, an all or nothing dependent variable. So I decided to put together a dependent variable in which the final figure of an animal started out with the pieces of the animal far away from each other, and then they got closer as the experimenter clicked a "next" button. I'd love to get some feedback on what I've put together. It's a little crude at this point, but it does the basics. If you have a moment, check it out and let me know what you think. Just go to: http://www.thepsychfiles.com/gestalt/ Condition 1 is the control condition (no animals) and condition 2 is the experimental condition. Appreciate your time, Michael Michael Britt Host of The Psych Files www.thepsychfiles.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
