Vision Res.(08) Henle
Research into Visual Perception conducted by Henle
From the mid-1920s to the early 1940s the influence of past experience on human visual perception was a popular research area. Many investigators employed arrangements of simple two-dimensional geometrical shapes, sometimes alone and sometimes embedded in more complex forms.
Henle conducted research into human visual perception using alphabetic characters and their mirror reversals as the stimuli in his experiments. The results of this work were published in 1942. See, for example, the paper: M.Henle, "An experimental investigation of past experience as a determinant of visual form perception", J.Exptl.Psychol., Vol.30, pp.1-21 (1942).
Following previous work by Gottschaldt and Braly (among others), Henle argued that due to the effect on perception of both object shape and past experience having been established, both these factors shouldt be recognized.
He suggested that if an object is very familiar to the observer then the effect of past experience may be dominant, the opposite being true for complex, unfamiliar objects.
This section includes summaries of historial research and theories of human visual perception of simple two-dimensional objects. For more about the human visual system see The Eye, Parts
of Eye, Eye & Vision Disorders, Ophthalmological Procedures.
