In een doosje doen. De rijke reductie van visuele waarneming in het psychologisch experiment

Abstract

A gaze in the box. The rich reduction of visual perception in psychological experimentation. The idea that seeing is mediated by the cultural, historical and technological contexts in which it occurs is well established. Ruth Benschop examines an instance of what nonetheless appears to be unmediated visual perception. In the period when the classic cognitivist position was emerging in academic psychology, experimental psychologists were designing experiments with the explicit aim of separating visual perception from its polluting surroundings in order to understand the phenomenon itself. These attempts are ridiculed as being both naïve and destructive by critics of experimental psychology. In this article a position is sought that does justice to what experimental psychologists try to do, without becoming as naïve as their critics hold. An analysis of the detailed and mutual work to establish unmediated visual perception in a series of experiments concerned with the so-called word superiority effect shows that the critics' position is based on two unfortunate premises. Not only do critics mistake the creative and rich practice of experimental research for the highly reduced result it produces, they also favour a too ephemeral and untechnological notion of mediation. Who wants to understand visual perception is better sensitised by Edwin Hutchins' focus on the highly technological world of a navy ship in which he manages to recognize wild cognition, or indeed by looking for wild visual perception in the dusky confines of expenmental psychology's laboratory practice.