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An untrained eye: the tachistoscopeand photographic vision in earlyexperimental psychologyDavid Sweeney CoombsPublished online: 22 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: David Sweeney Coombs (2012) An untrained eye: the tachistoscope andphotographic vision in early experimental psychology, History and Technology: An InternationalJournal, 28:1, 107-117, DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2012.662348

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An untrained eye: the tachistoscope and photographic vision in earlyexperimental psychology

David Sweeney Coombs*

In 1906, the psychologist Walter Dearborn published a set of photographs that mark animportant moment in the history of scientific epistemologies of vision.1 Taken as part ofDearborn’s dissertation research at Columbia, the photographs (see Figure 1) depict theeye-movements of a subject being exposed to images in a tachistoscope, a devicedesigned to clock the speed of visual perception by flashing single images at an observerfor fractions of a second. Dearborn had joined a photographic apparatus to his tachisto-scope so that, as the photographic plate slid by the subjects’ eyes during the exposure ofthe image, the reflection of light from the observers’ corneas registered as a line indicat-ing whether any eye-movement had occurred. Abstract and spare, Dearborn’s photographsnonetheless reveal a great deal about the science of visual perception at the turn of thetwentieth century. Dearborn took his photographs in the midst of a debate in early experi-mental psychology over whether humans read words in one glance or whether they do soby focalizing small groups of a word’s constitutive letters. The question at issue – do weread with fixed or roving attention? – was not a trivial one. It occasioned a heated argu-ment among psychologists about the forms and degree of subjective agency at work invisual perception and thus, implicitly, about the epistemology of scientific objectivityitself. By analyzing the role of tachistoscopy in these debates over the psychology ofreading, this article aims to delineate an ethos of scientific observation at the turn of thecentury that revises Daston and Galison’s2 historical narrative of the epistemic shift fromthe late nineteenth-century ideal scientific ethos of mechanical objectivity to the earlytwentieth-century ideal ethos of trained judgment. The neglected ethos that I call simplyuntrained judgment complicates this historical trajectory and corrects significant over-sights in Daston and Galison’s panoramic view of the history of objectivity while alsodemonstrating that late nineteenth and early twentieth century scientific empiricism hasmore in common with the period’s aesthetic theory than is usually acknowledged.

Emerging in the 1850s, less than twenty years after the first daguerrotype wasmade, tachistoscopy shared with nineteenth-century ‘instant photography’ the aim toisolate a visual percept, to section it off from continuous experience.3 As the longexposure-times of early photography were reduced by innovations to the chemical com-position of photographic plates, the photograph became the means of an undreamt-ofanalysis of perceptual experience, as in Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1878 series ofphotographs of a horse galloping, taken at increments of 1/500th of a second, or Éti-enne-Jules Marey’s studies of animal movement produced by his photographic gun,which imposed twelve images per second on the same plate. The isolation of such frac-tions of a moment in photographic images seemed uncanny to contemporary observers,

*David Coombs is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University,Middletown, CT 06459, USA. Email: dcoombs@wesleyan.edu

History and TechnologyVol. 28, No. 1, March 2012, 107–117

ISSN 0734-1512 print/ISSN 1477-2620 online� 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2012.662348http://www.tandfonline.com

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startling them into an appreciation of just how inseparable any one percept is from theothers accompanying it in the stream of experience. The physiologist A.M. Bloch, forexample, explained the arresting quality of ‘instant photographs’ by noting that, unlikein such photographs, ‘in our sensorium, every movement is tied to that which precedesit and that which will follow. We do not see the galloping horse as it is, but as it wasand as it will be in a fraction of a second.’4 If instant photographs struck viewers withthe difference between such thin slices of time and the duration of human visual per-ception, the tachistoscope allowed scientists to analyze that duration, to abstract a singlepercept from it. Alfred Volkmann, the physiologist who first named and described atachistoscope, used it as a means of controlling and limiting stimuli during visual per-ception tests.5 While the experimental use of tachistoscopes varied over the course ofthe nineteenth century, its dominant function was to capture a single visual percept bycircumscribing a subject’s visual field and exposing him to an image for precisely cali-brated fractions of a second. Tachistoscope designs thus attempted as much as possibleto prevent eye-movement (by ensuring that the exposure struck the observer’s foveaswithout necessitating any substantial change of depth-focalization) as well as to elimi-nate any additional stimuli that would interfere with the subject’s attentiveness to theexposure, such as mechanical noises and significant changes in illumination.6 Somedesigns of the tachistoscope actually incorporated mechanical elements from photogra-phy, such as camera shutters. Even in the absence of such direct technical borrowings,however, tachistoscopy shared with photography a rhetoric of ‘exposure times’ thatmakes plain an underlying analogy: what the photographic plate is to photography, theretina and the brain are to tachistoscopy. Put another way, tachistoscopic experimentssought to measure a photographic eye.

Figure 1. Walter Dearborn’s photographs of eyes observing tachistoscopic exposures. The thin,faint strips of light were reflected from the observer’s corneas and their relative straightnessindicates that no significant eye movement occurred during the instant of exposure. Image fromDearborn, The Psychology of Reading, 54–5.

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Like photographs themselves, however, the photographic eye condenses into thevision of a moment the history of the labor that made it possible.7 ‘The memory tracesof earlier experiences still play an additional and highly influential role in the observationof our visual field,’ wrote Hermann von Helmholtz. ‘An observer who is no longercompletely inexperienced also receives – be it by momentary illumination through anelectric discharge [in the apparatus that the tachistoscope supplanted], be it by intentionalrigid fixation – without any eye movement a relatively rich image of the objects foundbefore him’.8 No matter how impoverished an instant of visual sensation might be, it isenriched by an act of unconscious perceptual judgment that uses the stimulus simply as‘the minor premise to which is applied the rule imprinted through earlier observations’(355).9 According to von Helmholtz, tachistoscopic experiments might well be able toisolate single percepts by controlling the conditions of exposure to a visual stimulus soas to exclude the possibility of eye-movements, but that single percept would itself be asynthesis combining the stimulus with innumerable earlier visual experiences. All visualpercepts are, ineluctably, composites; any act of perception is an interpretation of a pres-ent stimulus on the basis of the subject’s past. This unconscious synthesis, moreover,allows the perceiver to extract something like the essence of phenomena by pruning awaytheir accidental qualities: ‘if the similar traces, which are often left behind in our memo-ries by repeated perceptions, increase, then it is precisely the law-like that repeats itselfmost regularly in a similar manner, while fortuitous change is eliminated’.10 For vonHelmholtz, the eye is an unconscious scientist (or, as Timothy Lenoir11 argues, a mathe-matician), constantly forming and testing hypotheses about its environment and thus dis-covering such law-like regularities. This scientific eye is also, potentially, an artistic one.For von Helmholtz, the artist’s highest form of intuition – ‘registering … a new type ofresting or moving appearance of men and nature’ – is simply a highly developed versionof the same process of ‘unconscious inference’ that makes all forms of observation possi-ble. Thus, we are convinced that ‘the artist has beheld the real … when he brings beforeus an example cleansed of accidental disturbances … that fills us with the conviction oftruth’.12 Von Helmholtz’s classicist theory of art led him to conclude that artistic and sci-entific vision are fundamentally the same in their methodical search for the laws ofappearances.13 While classicism was hardly a dominant aesthetic in the latter half of thenineteenth century, the most influential criticism of von Helmholtz’s position by an artistwas not a defense of the Romantic imperative to transform perceived reality through art,but rather Walter Pater’s argument that ‘the real’ escapes all modes of observation thatthus seek to discover the regularities of phenomena.14

It is Pater who made the first explicit call for the cultivation of untrained judgment asa mode of observation. Pater began his career as a founding figure in the British Aes-thetic Movement by declaring perceptual habits like those of unconscious inferenceincompatible with true aesthetic experience. ‘Our failure is to form habits,’ Pater wrote inthe conclusion to The Renaissance, ‘for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world,and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, sit-uations, seem alike’.15 Rather than enabling the artist to wrest new types of appearancefrom the merely accidental in their instantiations, perceptual habits blind the artist’s oraesthete’s eye to all that is uniquely present in an object of experience. Pater thereforeenjoined aesthetes to unlearn the ways they had been trained to see, to efface the rulesimprinted by earlier experiences so as to make themselves a blank slate to each new,unrepeatable experience. Charles Sanders Peirce described a similar attitude as the firststep of scientific inquiry in his influential 1877 essay.16 Scientific inquiry, Peirce writes,is stimulated by the painful sensation of doubt that occurs when our beliefs, the

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perceptual habits that normally guide our actions, are forestalled or suspended. Now Pei-rce, clearly drawing from von Helmholtz, argued that all such inquiry terminates in theformation of new habits more accurately reflecting knowledge gleaned from ‘the laws ofperception’.17 Nevertheless, the origins of scientific inquiry in doubt and the suspensionof perceptual habit bear witness to a shift that became more pronounced in the last twodecades of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, the perceptual habits that define uncon-scious inference were represented not as a form of scientific observation through whichone beholds the real but as a form of automatic, reflexive vision that sees only what itexpects to see and is therefore especially liable to error and deception.18

It is thus in reaction to epistemologies of percepual habit like von Helmholtz’s theoryof ‘unconscious inference’ that a scientific ethos of untrained judgment emerges.Untrained judgment bears a certain resemblance to what Daston and Galison call‘mechanical objectivity.’19 Both ethoi scorn the unconscious subjective interpretation ofsense data that, for von Helmholtz, allows the observer to grasp the law-like in nature, ifnot nature’s laws.20 Both, too, seem to valorize an arduously willed passivity, as in thePaterian aesthete’s striving to make himself a blank slate for each experience. Untrainedjudgment emerges from and is defined against epistemologies of ‘trained judgment,’ how-ever, rather than leading to them, as mechanical objectivity does according to Daston andGalison.21 For this reason, an observer aspiring to untrained judgment seeks to unlearnall his training, refusing the automated and procedural strategies of observation andimage-production that are the hallmark of mechanical objectivity. Mechanical objectivity,moreover, aspires to constrain the kind of overactive subject found most emblematicallyin the domain of the arts. According to Daston and Galison, mechanical objectivityemerges together with a specific nineteenth-century axis of subjectivity where ‘a scientificself grounded in a will to willessness [is found] at one pole, and an artistic self that circu-lated around a will to willfulness [is found] at the other’.22 Untrained judgment, in con-trast, shares key features with nineteenth-century models of aesthetic judgment. As inmost versions of post-Kantian aesthetic judgment, the subject of untrained judgmentaspires to a state of cognitive liberation from determination by both social and materialforces. The untrained observer seeks to suspend habits of perception that normally act asa kind of cognitive shorthand for the faster and more economical guidance of action inthe world; his judgment is ‘untrained’ in the sense that it aims both at the unlearning of aconventional way of seeing and at the suspension of the teleological conjunctions throughwhich perception finds its end in action. Henri Bergson best captures the promise of therewards awaiting the observer who can thus untrain his habituated perceptual faculties.23

The impotence of speculative reason, as Kant has demonstrated it, is perhaps at bottom onlythe impotence of an intellect enslaved to the necessities of bodily life and concerned with amatter which man has had to disorganize for the satisfaction of his wants. Our knowledge ofthings would thus no longer be relative to the fundamental structure of our mind, but onlyto its superficial and acquired habits, to the contingent form which it derives from our bodilyfunctions and from our lower needs. The relativity of knowledge may not, then, be defini-tive. By unmaking that which these needs have made, we may restore to intuition its originalpurity and so recover contact with the real.24

In the less than twenty years intervening between von Helmholtz’s 1878 ‘The Factsin Perception’ and Bergson’s 1896 Matter and Memory, what it meant for an observer tobehold the real underwent an almost complete reversal.

The epistemic shift from trained to untrained judgment fundamentally altered thedesign and stakes of tachistoscopic experiments at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Tachistoscopic vision no longer confirmed scientists’ capacity to discover the law-like innature, as it did for von Helmholtz, but instead posed thorny questions about how muchof the world escapes observation. This transformation began with James McKeen Cat-tell’s tachistoscopic experiments at Wilhelm Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory in the 1880s.25

Cattell, who would go on to mentor Walter Dearborn at Columbia, re-designed the deviceso as to achieve greater precision in the timing of both exposure and response. Christenedby Wundt as the ‘fall tachistoscope’ (see Figure 2), Cattell’s exposure apparatus used afalling screen released by an electromagnet; the screen’s weight could be adjusted so asto alter its velocity and thus lengthen or shorten exposure times. As it fell, the screentripped one switch as soon as the exposure began and another as soon as it ended, allow-ing Cattell to time exposures exactly. The viewer, meanwhile, was equipped with a lip-key that would register the precise moment that he began speaking to name what he hadseen during the exposure, thus enabling Cattell likewise to measure reaction-times. Unlikeearlier physiologists, Cattell used the tachistoscope to measure not just the speed of sight,but also the speed of thought. Hence the title he gave his summary of the experiments:‘The Time it Takes to See and Name Objects’ (my italics). It was in the service of thisambition that he began using words and letters as exposures.26 This important innovationled to a surge of experiments that used the tachistoscope to measure the speed of read-ing.27 Unlike images, written words, in order to be read, seem to demand a linear formof processing that would combine their elements in the right order (from left to right, forexample, though this is, of course, not the only way). Cattell, however, argued that weperceive words as well as short sentences as wholes, basing this conclusion on his find-ings that a given subject could name three times as many letters in an exposure if theyformed familiar words and almost twice as many words in an exposure if they formedsentences. A decade later, research by Benno Erdmann and Raymond Dodge28 extendedand refined Cattell’s argument that we perceive familiar words as wholes. Erdmann andDodge claimed our perception of words hinges on perceptual habits that allow the subject

Figure 2. An experiment with a gravity chronometer like the one designed by James Cattell(courtesy of Clark University Archives).

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to instantaneously recognize a given word’s total visual shape. Cattell, they argued, hadactually been too conservative in his calculations of the advantage in reaction timebought by such habits. In their experiments, Erdmann and Dodge found that a subjectcould pick out four to five times as many letters if they formed words, not just two orthree. Erdmann himself claimed that he had even accurately perceived a 22-letter wordduring an instant of tachistoscopic vision. So far, so von Helmholtzian. Neither Cattellnor Erdmann and Dodge made arguments at variance with Helmholtz’s claim that tachis-toscopic vision demonstrated the trained judgment at work in perception. Yet Erdmannand Dodge’s arguments infuriated Wundt and led to a public controversy over the exis-tence of a form of untrained judgment.

Wundt’s fight with Erdmann and Dodge revolved around the nature of perceptualagency in tachistoscopic vision. Incensed by their total-shape theory of word-perception(though he had ignored the similar argument made by Cattell), Wundt was especiallyincredulous about Erdmann’s claim to have perceived a 22-letter word in a single exposureof less than a tenth of a second. He accused them both of designing their experimentsincompetently, allowing differences in illumination to produce retinal after-images thatextended the exposure time from a tenth to a quarter of a second. Wundt’s charges rein-forced the urgency of ongoing efforts to ensure that exposures were simultaneous. Erd-mann and Dodge themselves complained that most tachistoscopic exposures mimic thepurportedly successive movements of the reading eye as the shutter draws from one endof the exposure-slide to the other. In response to these criticisms, J.P. Hylan alternated thedirection of the shutter’s movement from left to right and vice versa, finding that this cre-ated no significant difference in his subjects’ speed, accuracy, and order of recall.29 Atsuch fractions of a second, he concluded, a successive exposure is not perceived as such.Dearborn’s photographs served a similar purpose by demonstrating that no eye-movementis possible during the brief window offered by tachistoscopic exposures.30 Given thatexposures are seen simultaneously, psychologists speculated that the images on themmight still be perceived successively. Even, that is, if the subject’s eyes did not move dur-ing an exposure, his attention might range over the image seen. Drawing a distinctionbetween visual focalization and attention, psychologists framed the question thus: do sub-jects read words in tachistoscopic exposures with fixed or with roving attention?

These two alternatives were freighted with epistemological significance for experi-mental psychology. Wundt was an influential partisan for roving attention, which heunderstood as ‘apperception.’ Wundt’s theory of apperception was itself modeled on nine-teenth-century physiology’s division of the eye into fovea – densely grouped photorecep-tor cells that produce a narrowly circumscribed area of sharply detailed, definitelycolored images – and periphery – the much sparser set of cells grouped around the foveathat produce our vague, washed-out, but highly movement-sensitive peripheral vision.‘Consciousness,’ Wundt wrote, ‘is regarded as a field of vision: objects enter it and are atfirst only obscurely and indefinitely perceived, as those visual objects whose images enterthe field of the eye at the sides of the retina. Time is required for the objects to arrive atthe spot of clear vision … where discerning attention is bestowed on them and they areapperceived’.31. In roving-attention models of reading, apperceptive attention thus servedas a mental fovea, ranging over and clarifying the letter-components in a tachistoscopicexposure even as the subject’s actual foveas were frozen in place. In contrast, Wundtidentified fixed-attention models of reading with what he called ‘assimilation.’32 In assim-ilation, Wundt wrote, given sensory elements ‘call up particular memory-elements corre-sponding to themselves. These memories then exercise an assimilative effect on theimmediate impression, and the impression in turn reacts in the same way on the repro-

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duced elements’.33 This dynamic series of perceptual transformation is both simultaneousand unconscious in experience. Thus, while apperception is a diachronic perceptualprocess in which the mind’s eye focalizes and clearly perceives each element of anexposure, assimilation is a synchronic process in which the subject reflexively supple-ments fragmentary, incomplete sensory data with elements drawn from the observer’shabitual perceptions.34 Psychologists saw an important difference between these twomodes of perception. They characterized apperceptive (roving-attention) reading as objec-tive and assimilative (fixed-attention) reading as subjective.35

The distinction between objective and subjective reading was a distinction betweentwo different kinds of subjective agency in perception. Most importantly for my argu-ment, subjective reading does not reflect mechanical objectivity’s nemesis, the overactivesubject, but rather one who is not active enough. Wundt conceived of assimilation as,first and foremost, a passive mental process defined against the active mental process ofapperception.36 Unreflective and automatic, assimilation is perception in its passive,receptive moment, when sensory data are brought dimly into awareness before beingclearly and actively apprehended by the mental fovea of apperception. This passivitymakes subjective reading more likely to miss details – such as transposed letters or mis-spellings – that deviate from what the observer has been trained to recognize. As EckartScheerer glosses the position of Wundt and his students, ‘the overlooking of typographi-cal errors is favored by a passive attitude and can only be overcome by attempting anactive, “apperceptive” analysis of the word’.37 Objective reading, however, is notachieved through mechanical objectivity’s willed self-effacement but rather through thesubject’s active effort to thus overcome the perceptual habits at work in passive assimila-tion. Tellingly, the version of objective reading most widely accepted by psychologistswas the reading of words in a foreign language, whose unfamiliarity forced the observerto scrutinize short letter-complexes in just the way Wundtian apperception proceeds,except more slowly and painstakingly.38 Objective reading thus treats words in a nativelanguage like words in a foreign one, and gains in the accurate apprehension of an expo-sure as it does so.

In the context of tachistopic experiments, objective reading constituted an act ofuntrained judgment within split-second durations that so far outstripped normal humanperceptual faculties as to constitute a major problem for nineteenth-century scientificobservation.39 The consensus therefore slowly emerged in early twentieth-century experi-mental psychology that objective reading simply was not possible during such slight frag-ments of time. By having his subjects focus their attention to the left of the visualfixation point and finding that this improved the accurate perception of letters on the leftside of the exposure and decreased the accurate perception of letters on the right side,Erich Becher40 demonstrated that attention can no more scan across the exposure slideduring a split second than can the eye proper. The tachistoscope did not give attentiontime enough to rove. Echoing Becher’s arguments, Hylan contended that attention doesits work belatedly, only focalizing elements of an exposure after the subject has assimi-lated it (400–1).41 Reviewing these and other arguments, Guy Whipple emphasized thedifficulty, if not impossibility, of ‘distinguish[ing] between what is actually seen and whatis “centrally” supplied in tachistoscopic experiments’.42 Wundt himself ultimately sig-naled his own concession to Erdmann and Dodge’s fixed-attention models of reading byemploying their concept of the word-image.43 The particular form of untrained judgmentembodied in objective reading thus ceased to be of epistemological moment for experi-mental psychology, although in altered form it did migrate back to aesthetic theory, whereit played a key role in the emergence of Formalism.44

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The ultimate implausibility of objective reading reflects a paradoxical logic at work inthe attempt to use the tachistoscope to demonstrate untrained judgment. Dodge capturedthis paradoxical logic nicely in his review of a set of experiments conducted by Wundt’sstudent, Julius Zeitler.45 Reasoning that the passive and unreflective back-and-forth ofstimulus and central processing that constitutes assimilation would take more time tooccur than the active focalization of the stimulus in apperception, Zeitler attempted todemonstrate apperceptive reading by dropping the exposure-time below the thresholdrequired for assimilation to occur. In his review, Dodge argued that this line of experi-ment was self-defeating. If ‘apperceptive reading is characterized by the predominance ofthe objective elements in consciousness’ as opposed to the subjective elements, Zeitler’sminimum exposure-time ‘affects precisely those objective elements, making them as faintas possible’.46 Zeitler’s technique, Dodge implied, could only elicit even more subjectiveperceptual activity as the observer’s mind struggled to compensate for the faintness of anexposure so brief that it had dwindled to almost nothing. In the logic of untrainedjudgment, however, this technique makes perfect sense: the more subjective activity iselicited, the closer one is to the real, even as it vanishes.

Notes1. Dearborn, The Psychology of Reading.2. Daston and Galison, Objectivity.3. Ruth Benschop, ‘What is a Tachistoscope?,’ points out that the function and design of the

tachistoscope, like those of other scientific instruments, have been multifarious, changing asthe device migrated from one set of scientific practices and purposes to another. For my pur-poses, I will focus on the tachistoscope’s function as a means of measuring visual perceptionand reaction times, but I do not mean to suggest that this is always or only what defines it.

4. Bloch, ‘Psychologie,’ 588. Cited in Canales, A Tenth of a Second, 79.5. Volkmann first wrote about the tachistoscope in 1859, but as Benschop points out, he claimed to

have been using it for several years beforehand. See Benschop, ‘What is a Tachistoscope?’, 27.6. Volkmann proposed the tachistoscope as an alternative to similar apparatuses (used, for example,

by von Helmholtz) that employed an electric spark to illuminate an exposure field in a darkenedbox. A sudden and dramatic change in lighting, he argued, made any measurements of instanta-neous perception imprecise by overloading the eye with stimuli. The tachistoscope, in contrast,allowed for a much more controlled exposure that would only introduce minimal differences ofstimuli into a subject’s visual field. See Benschop, ‘What is a Tachistoscope?’, 30; Volkmann,‘Das Tachistosop’, 90.

7. Even in the nineteenth century, ostensibly the high-water mark of naïve belief in the veracityof photographs, the history of a photograph’s making was recognized as an important criterionof its truthfulness. As Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed, demonstrates, Victorians’ trust in agiven photograph often depended on the social context of its production, distribution, anddisplay, i.e. on an appraisal of the human agency involved.

8. Von Helmholtz, Science and Culture, 356.9. Ibid, 355.10. Ibid. In this regard, von Helmholtz’s epistemology bears some important traces of the ethos

that Daston and Galison (Objectivity) call ‘selection,’ which was dominant in eighteenth-cen-tury scientific practice. Von Helmholtz’s epistemology was deeply indebted to the classicismthat prevailed in eighteenth-century arts and science, as I explain below.

11. Lenoir, ‘The Eye as Mathematician’.12. Von Helmholtz, Science and Culture, 355.13. Hatfield, ‘Helmholtz and Classicism,’ 541–58.14. Pater, The Renaissance.15. Ibid, 152.16. Peirce, ‘The Fixation of Belief.’17. Ibid., 14. For an acknowledgement of Peirce’s debt to von Helmholtz by one of his contempo-

raries, see G. Stanley Hall’s ‘Philosophy in the United States,’ 102.

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18. Thus by 1895, R. Meade Bache, ‘Reaction Time,’ could interpret the slower reaction-times ofwhite experimental subjects compared to black and Native American subjects in his study asthe expression of whites’ greater capacity for reflective and accurate understanding of theworld. Similarly, the psychologist Joseph Jastrow argued that non-whites had less control overtheir perceptual habits and thus were more susceptible to illusions. For an account of Jastrow’sracialized psychology of deception that illustrates the changed attitude towards perceptualhabit, see Pettit, ‘Joseph Jastrow’.

19. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 115–90.20. In Daston and Galison’s terms, both mechanical objectivity and untrained judgment respond to

a shift from conceiving of objects as types to conceiving of objects as particulars (see Dastonand Galison, Objectivity, 161).

21. As described by Daston and Galison, Objectivity, trained judgment is, like von Helmholtz’stheory of unconscious inference, a mode of vision that has been so shaped by practice that theeye reflexively focalizes and interprets salient details without the scientist’s awareness or con-scious direction. It is all the more striking then, that von Helmholtz appears only obliquely inDaston and Galison, Objectivity, featuring solely as one of Gottlob Frege’s empiricist enemies.Partly, this neglect stems from Daston and Galison’s focus on image-production in scientificatlases rather than, as Jennifer Tucker notes, image-reception and its attendant problems andquestions (Tucker, ‘Objectivity, Collective Sight,’ 655). His absence also leaves uncomplicatedthe historical trajectory in Objectivity from mechanical objectivity in the nineteenth century totrained judgment in the twentieth.

22. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 38–9.23. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory.24. Ibid., 184.25. Cattell, ‘The Time it Takes.’26. Cattell’s subjects recognized images and colors slightly faster than words, but took longer to

name them (Cattell, ‘The Time it Takes’). The reason for his, he speculated, was that the asso-ciation between the ‘idea’ or recognized image of a word and its name or audio-motor articula-tion occurs habitually enough to happen automatically, while to make such a link between arecognized image and its name requires voluntary effort.

27. Indeed, as Charles Acland, ‘The Swift View,’ chronicles, for almost the next century, thetachistocope would be popularly seen as a means of clocking and improving reading speeds.

28. Erdmann and Dodge, Psychologische Untersuchungen.29. Hylan, ‘The Distribution of Attention.’30. Tachistoscopy’s obsession with micro-managing the attention of experimental subjects –

preventing eye-movements as well as excluding noises, lighting changes, any pretexts fordistraction that might contaminate the single, pure instant of visual perception it sought tograsp – has been interpreted in scholarly literature as amounting to a kind of assault on theobserver. Jonathan Crary, for example, characterizes late nineteenth-century tachistoscopy as‘an instance of the production of “shock” as an integral part of the institutional determinationof normative human behavior and response’ (Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 306). FriedrichKittler goes much further. Characterizing the tachistoscope as ‘a typewriter whose type hits theretina,’ he describes experimental subjects as ‘victims,’ ‘chained’ to the device and undergoing‘torment,’ and this despite the fact that these subjects were often the experimenters themselves(Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 222–3, 252). These accounts correctly identify psy-chologists’ interest in enforcing certain kinds of passivity during the viewing act, but thatenforced passivity was designed merely as a means of throwing into relief what was really atissue in these experiments: the precise form of the perceiving subject’s agency.

31. Wundt, Grundzüge, 85–92, Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 291, used for trans.)32. Wundt argues for this classification of fixed and roving attention in a new chapter added to

the sixth edition of his Gründzuge der physiologischen Psychologie, among other places (seeScheerer, ‘Early German Approaches,’ 117–21). It was widely accepted by other psychologists(see Zeitler, ‘Tachistoskopische Versuche,’ Messmer, Zur Psychologie des Lesens Cameron,‘Psychology of Reading,’ and Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests).

33. Wundt, The Outlines of Psychology, 233.34. Psychologists did not necessarily see these processes as mutually exclusive. Zeitler, for

instance, argued that reading begins apperceptively, but becomes assimilative once a subjecthas apperceived a proportion of letter-complexes sufficient to fill in the rest of the word.

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35. See, for example, Messmer, Zur Psychologie des Lesens as well as Dodge, ‘The Psychology ofReading,’ 58, and Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests, 241.

36. Wundt, The Outlines of Psychology, 223.37. Scheerer, ‘Early German Approaches,’ 119.38. Noting that the rate at which a subject could perceive words depended on his familiarity with

the language the words belonged to, Cattell had suggested that teachers could use tachisto-scopic exposures to test students’ proficiency in foreign languages (Cattell, ‘The Time itTakes,’ 65).

39. For a history of the problems presented by durations of a tenth of a second or less withinastronomy, psychology, physics, and other sciences in the nineteenth century, see Canales, ATenth of a Second.

40. Becher, Experimentelle und kritische Beiträge41. Hylan, ‘The Distribution of Attention.’42. Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests, 238. Following Oskar Messmer, Zur Psychologie

des Lesens, the distinction between subjective and objective reading survived as a way of looselydifferentiating those subjects who perceived more and longer words with less precision and thosewho perceived fewer and shorter words with more accuracy. Dearborn, The Psychology of Read-ing, for example, used the same distinction between different individuals’ modes of reading,though he did not follow Messmer in referring to the two modes as objective and subjective.

43. Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology.44. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Iskusstvo kak priyom,’ transposes modes of objective and subjective read-

ing to modes of language, which he divides into the poetic and the prosaic. Like objectivereading, poetic language works to ‘deautomize’ perception so that its objects can be seen anew.The untrained judgment of objective reading thus lies at the origins of Shklovsky’s influentialconcept of ‘defamiliarization.’

45. Zeitler, ‘Tachistoskopische Versuche.’46. Dodge, ‘The Psychology of Reading,’ 58.

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