How to Organize your Perception? -

Perceiving takes place when stimuli activate the sense organs. But at that point the perceptual story is not nearly complete. When we ask about the nature of what is perceived, we observe at the very outset the distinguishing feature of organization. The sensory information from the eyes, ears, nose, and skin is arranged in an orderly and meaningful manner. The problem of perception is also semantic in nature; even simple words become invoh'ed. A color may be "blue" in English,and "bleu" in French, but it is just another shade of what we call "gray" to the color-blind person.
Figure and Ground
One of the 'post elemental organiling principles in perception is the tendency to pattern stimuli in terms of a figure-ground relationship. Not all parts of a stimulating situation reach one's awareness with equal clarity. That which we focus on at any given moment with any of the sense organs is the figure. That which is experienced at the same time but is out of focus is known as the ground. At this very moment your perceptions are organized in terms of figure and ground as you read this page. The printed words represent figure and the white spaces are ground. In every perceptual act the figure-ground principles is operating when a selected part of the stimulating situation is perceived as standing out from the background: roses stand out against the green leaves of the bush, peach blossoms against the eaves and branches of the tree, mountains stand out against the sky, soloists against the background of the chorus, the melody lines of a trumpet against a background of harmonies. The factors that deter­main what will be figure appear to be distinctiveness of shape and contour, familiarity, novelty, grouping, and meaningfulness. In short, the things that make "sense" and are important to the perceiver stand out as figure, and the unimportant and less meaningful things form ::he ground.
Camouflage 
Sometimes we want to make a deliberate confusion of figure and ground. The aim of camouflaging is to destroy the enemy's perception of the figure.to conceal things that are familiar, meaningful, and rmportanL Thus sharp contours v,hich make an airplane hangar stand out as figure .are removed by the use of roof netting; a soldier's uniform is made to blend with the jungle; a field gun located on the edge of the jungle is painted to resemble trees. In the protective coloration of birds, animals, and insects, we see many examples of camouflage in nature.
Similarity 
The organized nature of perception is strikingly apparent when we notice that we tend to group stimuli in certain ways. According to one grouping principle, stimuli that are more similar to one another will have a greater tendency to be grouped. Similarity may, of course. manifest itself through a variety of characteristics ­shape, size, color, expression, or any other distinguishable property of he stimulus. And the similarity must always be "seen" in a psychogical sense, i.e., as perceived by the observer. To you, the similarity between a kangaroo and an opossum may simply be that both are animals; to a zoologist the similarity may be that both are marsupials.
Proximity 
Another grouping principle has to do with how near in time or space stimuli are to each other. Stimuli that are in closer proximity have a. greater tendency to be grouped. Grouping on the basis of nearness in time is apparent when, in a series of light flashes, the flashes occurring close together in time tend to b grouped.
Togetherness of Stimuli 
Stimuli are also organized according to the continuity principles which states that there is a tendency for elements to go with other as to permit the continuation of a line, curve, or movement in the direction already established. Because of the continuity principle, two crossing lines are perceived as two crossing lines instead of as four times. The tops of the buildings in New York are perceived as a skyline, instead of as isolated units, because of the continuity principle.
Desire for Completion 
A final grouping principle that shapes one's perceptions is called closure. The closure tendency operates in other sensory areas, too. In hearing, for example, there is a strong tendency to bring about closure by completing the rhythm.
You now see not only that perception is a process of stimulating the senses, but also that the messages from the sense organs are arranged or ordered so that the world as we come to know it is organized. But there is more to perception. Still to be reckoned with are a variety of personal factors such as prior experience, mental sets, needs, and emotion, and the ways in which they influence one's perception of the world.
Perceiving Things Differently 
The apparent size of people can be influenced by placing them in rooms of distorted shape. They appear to be of three different heights.
Perception is certainly not a simple process. We see things in relation to our own needs, past experience, and feelings. In one experiment, a woman observed in a window the face of her husband to whom she had been married for twenty-five years. When compared with the face of another man in a nearby window, her husband's face seemed to her to remain unchanged as he moved around. The other man appeared to grow or shrink as he moved to and fro.
Suspecting that there might ue some special emotional relation­ship between this woman and her husband, the investigator repeated this experiment with other married couples. A stranger acted as the control in each experiment.
Most of the individuals saw their partner grow and shrink in the usual manner, and to the same apparent degree as the control stranger. However, six viewers reported that their partners altered less than the stranger or did not change at all. These couples turn out to be only recently married.
In another study, involving the use of distorted lenses, some interesting observations were made. When an enlisted man looked through the lenses, his immediate superior, an officer, appeared I distorted than enlisted men in the room. Later twenty-four navy recruits viewed two different men through the lenses. One man wo the insignia of the recruits' immediate petty-officer superiors. The other man wore the insigl,ia and canvas leggings of a recruit. Th results showed that twenty-two of the twenty-four subjects requ.ired lenses of higher distortion power to perceive the "officer" as dis· torted. Measurements showed that the increase in lens power averaged about 50 percent.
. Is some emotional anxiety involved in these phenomena? Is some feeling of identification playing a part? We do not have good answers to these types of questions. Even children who view them­-el\'es in a mirror through distorted lenses report different kinds of .::astartian at different ages. Girls, who are typically more anxious about their appearance than boys, consistently report less distortion than boys of the same age. Both children and adults report that their
wn mirror image is distorted in different ways from that of another person. One's own image changes mainly in detail. The other person's image appears to change in overall size and shape.
There is little doubt that in daily living we perceive the same :bings in different ways, and at different times. Some people characteristically view their world for only a moment in time; other people relate to the past. Perhaps one student put a great deal of understand­Ing in this statement, "When I was nineteen my dad didn't know anything. When I was twenty-one I was surprised to see how much he had learned in two years."

What is "Problem Spaces"?

The Problem Spaces
The newborn infant begins life with a complex set of inherited mechanisms. However, he or she also begins life relatively "content free," like a computer which has yet to be programmed. But as development occurs, information gets stored away, to be used later in helping to solve problems. Since different contents relate to different kinds of problems they are stored in different "problem spaces", presumably in the brain. Accordingly, information­processing theory says that problem solving takes place by search within a given problem space. When a problem comes up, we must first perceive the nature of it. Previous experience is helpful in both recognizing and understanding the problem. Next, we must Eearch for a similar problem with its given problem space or, if one does not exist, we must construct one. Much of our intellectual activity con­sists of searching, changing, and modifying stored information in the course of seeking a solution.
Quite often, in our daily activities, stored information is ready for our use. For example, we enter a department store and ask:
"Where do I find the sports department?" "Second floor, down the center aisle and to the left." "Thank you," and off we go with confidence because all the information is relevant to us. Progress in problem solving comes as the new gets integrated with the old, and for human beings this is a very rapid process. In as little as 100 milliseconds symbols can be stored. Thus, the possibilities for storage of new information in the brain are enormous, while searching through a problem space, selecting, and executing some solution can take place rapidly. Thus, we can make a split-second decision to head for the side of the road when we see a skidding car coming toward us. Of course, problem solving can be long and drawn out as we put more and more information into the various problem spaces; the long time spent in career decision making is an example.
Over a period of time, with each week or year of life, we are informationally richer than we were before. We have built into our problem-solving system a multitude of problem spaces that enable us to deal with decisions, to work math problems, or to plan our strat­egies for a campus dance. To repeat, problem solving is a very orderly process, even when we are dealing with a very complex problem in human relations.

6 Basic Characteristics of Learning

Characteristics of Learning
Let us now examine an everyday learning situation in order to see what happens when we learn. Consider the case of a person le2rning to drive an automobile.' Despite his desire to drive, he does not have the necessary skill, so he sets out to change his behavior. At first his efforts are only partially successful. He starts wi~h a violent jerk or stalls the engine. Once he is under way, steering becomes a problem as he cuts the corners too sharply or is unable to stay on the right side of the road. Abrupt stopping may occur because of inappropriate braking action. The driver displays many responses, some right and some wrong. Those which he perceives as wrong are gradually eliminated in favor of the responses which are right in that they lead him toward the goal of driving the car in the proper way. He repeats the right responses over and over again and they become smoother. more precise, and better timed. Eventually, driving an automobile is added to his repertoire of behavior. And in one way, at least, the individual is a different person from his former self. He is now an automobile driver, whereas before he was not.
The Learning Goal 
Certain elements common to most learning situations are present in the driving task. In the first place there is a goal. This meclnS that the learner wants something. He has a need or desire to learn. If such an urge is not present, he will never get under way. Before a man can be taught to operate a lathe, he must want to learn to be a lathe operator. You won't learn about psychology or tennis or calculus or typing unless you want to acquire this knowledge or learn these skills. Why a person would want to drive an automobile is perhaps obvious, but in this analysis the reason is of no consequence. The point to be remembered is that he did have the desire.
Often we fail to appreciate the importance of the learner's goal in teaching or training because the goal as the teacher perceives it may be different from the learner's perception of the goal. If the eacher's goal is to get the student to learn as much as possible about the subject matter in the available length of time, he may be disap­pointed when the student's performance falls far below the teacher's expectations. The reason for the mediocre peIiormance may lie in the student's goal. Perhaps his goal wa$ to learn just enough to get by or 'ust enough to make a C grade. There will be a difference in what is earned in an industrial training program if the trainer's goal is to get 'he employee to learn to produce the maximum number of units of a given quality in a given time and the employee's goal is to produce just enough to keep the foreman off his back and the time-study man from tting his rate.
Responses Are Necessary 
After the individual has a desire or need to learn, so that there is a :lear-cut goal in his own mind, wha.t else is necessary if learning is to :ake place? The old adage that "we learn by doing" provides the answer. Thus, the second factor common to all learning is some kind activity, or response. The learner himself must do something­-ake responses. This activity may be overt, e.g., arm, leg, or hand activity in playing tennis, or it may be internal, as when he manipulates ideas in solving a problem. Trying to teach a person anything by giving him a verbal description of what you want him to do, or ::emonstrating to him how the task should be done, or showing him by -eans of a film the nature of the skilled performance, is of little use unless it leads to active doing by the learner himself. The person who earned to drive the automobile not only had the desire to learn but he ::id something about it by resorting to many responses-arm, leg, ~ger, reading, judging responses-all of which were a part of his natural equipment.
Of course, the necessary responses for attaining a goal must be Potentially available to the would-be learner. A feebleminded person annot get through school because the intellectual responses necessary for schoolwork are not available to him. The very young child not learn to write until his nervous and muscular system are efficiently developed to enable him to make the fine coordinations necessary for handwriting. The responses necessary for learning a new task may also be limited by previous learning. Learning may be or impossible in an advanced course in mathematics if a prequisite is a basic course in algebra and the learner has never taken such a course. In the automobile driving situation the necessary responses are available to most people. In some cases, however, poor coordination, slow reaction speed, faulty vision, or some physical or mental defect may make it impossible to learn to drive.
Reinforcement 
How now do we account for the fact that tbe learner with a goal, and making many responses, selects certain of these responses-the right ones-and eliminates the wrong ones? This question brings us to the third basic characteristic of learning: reinforcement. The learner selects from all the responses he is making those that are reinforced. The responses that are not reinforce:! are eliminated or not learned.
You can easily understand the nature of reinforcement if you keep in mind that the person trying to -learn is, in a sense, out or balance with his environment. He sets out to restore himself to a balanced state by learning some adjustive act. The consequences of any act-reduction of pain, avoidance of- distress or punishment, recognition, success, reward, pleasure-which lead the rearner to­ward his goal are reinforcing. The satisfaction which accompanies a successful outcome reinforces the success-getting response, so the learner tends to repeat such responses. The unreinforced responses, since they are not successful in leading to the goal, are weakened. Our automobile driver -resorted JO many responses, some of which he eventually discovered were successful; others were unsuccessful. The former were repeated over and over again, each time receiving added reinforcement; the latter were not repeated because of lack of reinforcement, and hence were not learned.
The effect of knowing how one is doing-whether his reponses are right or wrong-provides the clearest and simplest illustration of reinforcement as a learning principle. In learning situations like playing tennis, bowling, casting for trout, or typewriting, the correct or successful response is usually apparent to the learner. When one makes a strike in bowling, the visual cues from the falling pins tell him immediately that the way he rolled the ball was the right way, and the ensuing reinforcement causes him to try to rall the ball the same way the next time. But suppose the learner has no way of knowing whether his response is correct. In a situation like this, reinforcement cannot occur, or is minimized, and hence learning should at least be retarded.
Lack of Reinforcement 
A striking illustration of how the lack of reinforcement impedes learning progress is a wartime study in which men were being trained to track airplanes with a tracking apparatus. Two groups of equal tracking ability, as determined by previous performance, were ob­s·erved. One group was given knowledge of results in the form of a buzzer which was sounded by the trainer whenever the trainee was off the ttacking point by more than 2 miles. In other words, reinforce­ment was present in the form of feedback to the learner as to the correct and, incorrect tracking responses. The other training group received no information at all and hence no reinforcement. After only sixty-eight minutes of practice, the group trained with the buzzer was found to be off target only 32 percent of the time, whereas the group trained without the buzzer was off 58 percent of the time. Reinforce­ment really works!
Classes of Reinforcers 
Because of earlier discussions of perceptual principles you should not be surprised to know that the effect of reinforcement will depend on the pe1'ception of the individual who is learning. An outcome that is reinforcing to one person may not be reinforcing to another. \\'hat one person re'gards as a rewarding experience may be regarded as a neutral or even as a punishing experience by another. However, in general, one can count on an allnost universal acceptance of certain classes of reinforcers such as money, food, status recognition, and companionship.
Reinforcement often occurs automatically, without the learner's being aware of the effect at the moment. Suppose that you have been playing mediocre golf for a couple of years and decide to improve your game with the help of a professional instructor. The instructor watches you play and criticizes your habit of gripping the club like a baseball bat. He says, "That is no way to hold a golf club. How on earth did you pick up that habit? You will probably reply that when you first took up golf, you simply picked up the club and tried to hit the ball. But why did you learn to grip the club in the wrong way? The wrong way must have been reinforced, otherwise it would not have been learned. The important point is that you did not perceive it to be the wrong way. Very likely you gave little thought to the grip, but concentrated on hitting the ball. The reinforcement that was respon­sible for your bad habit was probably the natural or comfortable feel of the baseball grip. You failed to grip the club the proper way because, to the novice, this way feels awkw.ard and strained. Much human learning occurs and persists under conditions of reinforce­ment which were never specifically identL'. 3d by the learnE., or if once identified, were later forgotten. Since so much of our learning comes about through association, let us look briefly at this process, which we call "conditioning."
Conditioning 
Day-by-day we run into many ways of associating things, For exam· pIe, the normal stimulus to start a flow of saliva is the taste of food. But how often our mouth waters at the mere sight of some favorite food. This happens because the sight of food has been associated in the past with its actual taste. This involves what we call con­ditioning: a given response (salivating) comes to be evoked br a previously neutral stimulus (sight) when this stimulus is combined several times with the stimulus which naturally elicits the response. In this Jilustration the flow of saliva is an unlearned response; that is, an unconditional response is a conditioned response. Thus sight has been substituted for tq.ste in eliciting the response of mouth watering.
The more nearly alike a new stimulus is to the original stimulus, the better it will.substitute for it. Sometimes we become conditioned to avoid things. A very unpleasant tasting medicine may be taken in a solution of orange juice. Weeks later the mere sight of an orange may make us shudder.
Through conditioning we often learn to attach value to things that have no intrinsic value. Let us illustrate by a study. In one experiment, secondary rewards ("poker chips") of certain colors were given to chimpanzees. Primary reward values (food, water, and play privileges) were assigned to different chips. The animals were placed in different cages that contained food and water vending machines, and a work apparatus requiring them to lift weights ir! order to get chips that would "buy" food, water, and play privileges. The chimps readily learned to operate the work apparatus, but they would not work for chips that would not buy them anything. They learned not only to manipulate the chip!i iri obtaining rewards but to discriminate between chips (by color) that wduld buy food, water, or activity. And they learned to weed out working for chips that would not buy anything. If the animals had a large number of chips, they would not work very ha~d to secure additional ones. Some the animals even learned to trade "food chips" for '''play chips."
Sometimes the "chimp-o-mat," as the vending machine was caIled, did not work. Yes, you guessed it-the animals banged it on the side! Both animals and humans behave in accord with many ways we have been conditioned. Here is where motivation becomes so im­portant to us in our learning.

Successful Conditioning of Learning

Conditioning of Learning
Day-by-day we run into many ways of associating things, For exam· pIe, the normal stimulus to start a flow of saliva is the taste of food. But how often our mouth waters at the mere sight of some favorite food. This happens because the sight of food has been associated in the past with its actual taste. This involves what we call con­ditioning: a given response (salivating) comes to be evoked br a previously neutral stimulus (sight) when this stimulus is combined several times with the stimulus which naturally elicits the response. In this Jilustration the flow of saliva is an unlearned response; that is, an unconditional response is a conditioned response. Thus sight has been substituted for tq.ste in eliciting the response of mouth watering.
The more nearly alike a new stimulus is to the original stimulus, the better it will.substitute for it. Sometimes we become conditioned to avoid things. A very unpleasant tasting medicine may be taken in a solution of orange juice. Weeks later the mere sight of an orange may make us shudder.
Through conditioning we often learn to attach value to things that have no intrinsic value. Let us illustrate by a study. In one experiment, secondary rewards ("poker chips") of certain colors were given to chimpanzees. Primary reward values (food, water, and play privileges) were assigned to different chips. The animals were placed in different cages that contained food and water vending machines, and a work apparatus requiring them to lift weights ir! order to get chips that would "buy" food, water, and play privileges. The chimps readily learned to operate the work apparatus, but they would not work for chips that would not buy them anything. They learned not only to manipulate the chip!i iri obtaining rewards but to discriminate between chips (by color) that wduld buy food, water, or activity. And they learned to weed out working for chips that would not buy anything. If the animals had a large number of chips, they would not work very ha~d to secure additional ones. Some the animals even learned to trade "food chips" for '''play chips."
Sometimes the "chimp-o-mat," as the vending machine was caIled, did not work. Yes, you guessed it-the animals banged it on the side! Both animals and humans behave in accord with many ways we have been conditioned. Here is where motivation becomes so im­portant to us in our learning.

Lack of Reinforcement and Its Classes - The Learning Characteristics

Lack of Reinforcement 
A striking illustration of how the lack of reinforcement impedes learning progress is a wartime study in which men were being trained to track airplanes with a tracking apparatus. Two groups of equal tracking ability, as determined by previous performance, were ob­s·erved. One group was given knowledge of results in the form of a buzzer which was sounded by the trainer whenever the trainee was off the ttacking point by more than 2 miles. In other words, reinforce­ment was present in the form of feedback to the learner as to the correct and, incorrect tracking responses. The other training group received no information at all and hence no reinforcement. After only sixty-eight minutes of practice, the group trained with the buzzer was found to be off target only 32 percent of the time, whereas the group trained without the buzzer was off 58 percent of the time. Reinforce­ment really works!
Classes of Reinforcers 
Because of earlier discussions of perceptual principles you should not be surprised to know that the effect of reinforcement will depend on the pe1'ception of the individual who is learning. An outcome that is reinforcing to one person may not be reinforcing to another. \\'hat one person re'gards as a rewarding experience may be regarded as a neutral or even as a punishing experience by another. However, in general, one can count on an allnost universal acceptance of certain classes of reinforcers such as money, food, status recognition, and companionship.
Reinforcement often occurs automatically, without the learner's being aware of the effect at the moment. Suppose that you have been playing mediocre golf for a couple of years and decide to improve your game with the help of a professional instructor. The instructor watches you play and criticizes your habit of gripping the club like a baseball bat. He says, "That is no way to hold a golf club. How on earth did you pick up that habit? You will probably reply that when you first took up golf, you simply picked up the club and tried to hit the ball. But why did you learn to grip the club in the wrong way? The wrong way must have been reinforced, otherwise it would not have been learned. The important point is that you did not perceive it to be the wrong way. Very likely you gave little thought to the grip, but concentrated on hitting the ball. The reinforcement that was respon­sible for your bad habit was probably the natural or comfortable feel of the baseball grip. You failed to grip the club the proper way because, to the novice, this way feels awkw.ard and strained. Much human learning occurs and persists under conditions of reinforce­ment which were never specifically identL'. 3d by the learnE., or if once identified, were later forgotten. Since so much of our learning comes about through association, let us look briefly at this process, which we call "conditioning."

Reinforcement - A Learning Characteristics

Reinforcement 
How now do we account for the fact that tbe learner with a goal, and making many responses, selects certain of these responses-the right ones-and eliminates the wrong ones? This question brings us to the third basic characteristic of learning: reinforcement. The learner selects from all the responses he is making those that are reinforced. The responses that are not reinforce:! are eliminated or not learned.
You can easily understand the nature of reinforcement if you keep in mind that the person trying to -learn is, in a sense, out or balance with his environment. He sets out to restore himself to a balanced state by learning some adjustive act. The consequences of any act-reduction of pain, avoidance of- distress or punishment, recognition, success, reward, pleasure-which lead the rearner to­ward his goal are reinforcing. The satisfaction which accompanies a successful outcome reinforces the success-getting response, so the learner tends to repeat such responses. The unreinforced responses, since they are not successful in leading to the goal, are weakened. Our automobile driver -resorted JO many responses, some of which he eventually discovered were successful; others were unsuccessful. The former were repeated over and over again, each time receiving added reinforcement; the latter were not repeated because of lack of reinforcement, and hence were not learned.
The effect of knowing how one is doing-whether his reponses are right or wrong-provides the clearest and simplest illustration of reinforcement as a learning principle. In learning situations like playing tennis, bowling, casting for trout, or typewriting, the correct or successful response is usually apparent to the learner. When one makes a strike in bowling, the visual cues from the falling pins tell him immediately that the way he rolled the ball was the right way, and the ensuing reinforcement causes him to try to rall the ball the same way the next time. But suppose the learner has no way of knowing whether his response is correct. In a situation like this, reinforcement cannot occur, or is minimized, and hence learning should at least be retarded.

Responses Are Necessary In Learning

Responses Are Necessary 
After the individual has a desire or need to learn, so that there is a :lear-cut goal in his own mind, wha.t else is necessary if learning is to :ake place? The old adage that "we learn by doing" provides the answer. Thus, the second factor common to all learning is some kind activity, or response. The learner himself must do something­-ake responses. This activity may be overt, e.g., arm, leg, or hand activity in playing tennis, or it may be internal, as when he manipulates ideas in solving a problem. Trying to teach a person anything by giving him a verbal description of what you want him to do, or ::emonstrating to him how the task should be done, or showing him by -eans of a film the nature of the skilled performance, is of little use unless it leads to active doing by the learner himself. The person who earned to drive the automobile not only had the desire to learn but he ::id something about it by resorting to many responses-arm, leg, ~ger, reading, judging responses-all of which were a part of his natural equipment.
Of course, the necessary responses for attaining a goal must be Potentially available to the would-be learner. A feebleminded person annot get through school because the intellectual responses necessary for schoolwork are not available to him. The very young child not learn to write until his nervous and muscular system are efficiently developed to enable him to make the fine coordinations necessary for handwriting. The responses necessary for learning a ew task may also be limited by previous learning. Learning may be or impossible in an advanced course in mathematics if a prequisite is a basic course in algebra and the learner has never taken such a course. In the automobile driving situation the necessary responses are available to most people. In some cases, however, poor coordination, slow reaction speed, faulty vision, or some physical or mental defect may make it impossible to learn to drive.

The Learning Goal and Psychology

The Learning Goal 
Certain elements common to most learning situations are present in the driving task. In the first place there is a goal. This meclnS that the learner wants something. He has a need or desire to learn. If such an urge is not present, he will never get under way. Before a man can be taught to operate a lathe, he must want to learn to be a lathe operator. You won't learn about psychology or tennis or calculus or typing unless you want to acquire this knowledge or learn these skills. Why a person would want to drive an automobile is perhaps obvious, but in this analysis the reason is of no consequence. The point to be remembered is that he did have the desire.
Often we fail to appreciate the importance of the learner's goal in teaching or training because the goal as the teacher perceives it may be different from the learner's perception of the goal. If the eacher's goal is to get the student to learn as much as possible about the subject matter in the available length of time, he may be disap­pointed when the student's performance falls far below the teacher's expectations. The reason for the mediocre peIiormance may lie in the student's goal. Perhaps his goal wa$ to learn just enough to get by or 'ust enough to make a C grade. There will be a difference in what is earned in an industrial training program if the trainer's goal is to get 'he employee to learn to produce the maximum number of units of a given quality in a given time and the employee's goal is to produce just enough to keep the foreman off his back and the time-study man from tting his rate.

Perceiving Things Differently

Perceiving Differently
The apparent size of people can be influenced by placing them in rooms of distorted shape. They appear to be of three different heights.
Perception is certainly not a simple process. We see things in relation to our own needs, past experience, and feelings. In one experiment, a woman observed in a window the face of her husband to whom she had been married for twenty-five years. When compared with the face of another man in a nearby window, her husband's face seemed to her to remain unchanged as he moved around. The other man appeared to grow or shrink as he moved to and fro.
Suspecting that there might ue some special emotional relation­ship between this woman and her husband, the investigator repeated this experiment with other married couples. A stranger acted as the control in each experiment.
Most of the individuals saw their partner grow and shrink in the usual manner, and to the same apparent degree as the control stranger. However, six viewers reported that their partners altered less than the stranger or did not change at all. These couples turn out to be only recently married.
In another study, involving the use of distorted lenses, some interesting observations were made. When an enlisted man looked through the lenses, his immediate superior, an officer, appeared I distorted than enlisted men in the room. Later twenty-four navy recruits viewed two different men through the lenses. One man wo the insignia of the recruits' immediate petty-officer superiors. The other man wore the insigl,ia and canvas leggings of a recruit. Th results showed that twenty-two of the twenty-four subjects requ.ired lenses of higher distortion power to perceive the "officer" as dis· torted. Measurements showed that the increase in lens power averaged about 50 percent.
. Is some emotional anxiety involved in these phenomena? Is some feeling of identification playing a part? We do not have good answers to these types of questions. Even children who view them­-el\'es in a mirror through distorted lenses report different kinds of .::astartian at different ages. Girls, who are typically more anxious about their appearance than boys, consistently report less distortion than boys of the same age. Both children and adults report that their
wn mirror image is distorted in different ways from that of another person. One's own image changes mainly in detail. The other person's image appears to change in overall size and shape.
There is little doubt that in daily living we perceive the same :bings in different ways, and at different times. Some people characteristically view their world for only a moment in time; other people relate to the past. Perhaps one student put a great deal of understand­Ing in this statement, "When I was nineteen my dad didn't know anything. When I was twenty-one I was surprised to see how much he had learned in two years."

Ways to Interpret Your Past Experience

Past Experience and Interpretition
The part played by prior experience in perceiving things is nicely demonstrated when a person localizes sounds. When you hear a sound, you try to locate it some place "out there." We are so used to doing this that anything which interferes with it upsets our localizing ability. Such an upset was experimentally studied by a psychologist who had people wear a device called a "pseudophone.", The pseu­dophone consists of a pair of ear trumpets so arranged that each receiving trumpet carries sound to the opposite side of the head. Wearing this instrument was at first disturbing, since there was a reversal of sounds, right and left. If the person was spoken to at the dinner table by someone at his right, he would turn to the left in answering. On the street the wearer of the pseudophone would often bump into people, because upon hearing their approach, he would move in the wrong direction. In time the subjects learned to get used to the new locations and made appropriate responses. The experiment is an interesting example of the effect of past experience on percep­tion.
Interpretations 
Suppose that a man wearing a white shirt is standing in bright light holding a piece of coal. By physical measurements it could be easily shown that the amount of light reflected from the shirt is many times greater than that reflected from the coal. Now if the man goes into a shadowed area or a dimly illuminated cellar and physical measurements are again made, the amount of light reflected from shirt i coal would be proportionately the same. But a comparative measul of the total amount of reflected light in sunlight and shadow waul show actually more light is coming from the coal in the sunlight than from the shirt in the cellar. Yet under all conditions of illumination the coal looks black and the shirt looks white. We have learned the color properties from past experience, and this experience detmines our perceptions, despite the physics of the situation. This discrep between perception and physics also occurs when, from past ex ence, you know the color of a dress or the upholstering of a pi furniture. These familiar objects "keep their color," regardless conditions of illumination.
The ability to see objects in depth or at a distanc provi number of illustratIons of the effect of past experience on percept From experience we know that objects near us are seen in clearer detail than faraway objects; hence vagueness in detail means d or distance from the observer. If you live in an industrial section of country where there are smoke and fog, try sometimee to guess distances in a part of the country where the atmosphere is clear; you will find that your estimates are quite inaccurate. From experien know the approximate size of a man and also that a man looks smaller the farther away he is from the observer; hence, knowing the size of objects, we perceive them at various distances from us, depending how big they appear.
The way one is reared in a particular culture often show past experience influences perception. For example, a loud belch the mouth of a dinner guest in some places of the Orient is perceived as a compliment by his host. It goes without saying that an American without knowledge of Oriental customs would perceive this behavior quite differently. Another example is the case of a group of African visitors in London who perceived the London bobbies as especi friendly because they raised their right hand, palm forward approaching traffic. Instead of perceiving this behavior as a sign stopping traffic, the Africans perceived it in terms of what this geasture meant in their own country.
To ignore a person's past experience is to ignore a major determl nant of perception. The world is perceived in terms of expcrienc formerly associated with it. Keep this in mind and you will stop making the common, and incorrect, assumption that everyone perceives the world in the same way.

Mental Set and Psychology - Mental Health

Set is the term applied to the tendency of a person to pay attention to certain features of a situation. The sprinter is set when he is waiting for the race to begin at the crack of the starter's gun. A tie salesman is set to notice his customer's neckwear; a shoe salesman, his shoes. Some sets are habitual; others are determined by the immediate aspects of a situation, including instructions as to what we are to observe. Right now you are set to learn about the role of set as a perceptual determinant.
Consider the following fc:.cts, keeping in mind that you will later be questioned about them. At the first floor of a building an elevator starts with six occupants; it stops at the second floor where two people get off and four get on; four persons get on and one gets off at the sixth floor; on the eighth floor, two people get off and three get on. How many stops did the elevator make? Many people cannot give the right answer, because, instead of counting stops, they 'were counting the number of persons getting on and off at each stop.
Influence by Set 
Here is a laboratory experiment which demonstrates the effect of set on perception. the exposure, the subjects of the experiment are asked to make a reproduction of what they have seen. When the subjects are told ahead of time that the exposed figure will be like a pair of eyeglasses, they perceive glasses, as indicated by reproductions such as those on the left. When other subjects are shown the same figure under the same conditions but are told to expect a dumbbell, they draw reproductions like that on the right.
Another experiment on set and perception was carried out by briefly exposing to groups of subjects a series of words, some in their normal printed form and some reversed. Without definite instructions as to what to expect, the subjects were slower to recognize the reversed words than those presented in their normal way. When, however, they were told beforehand that some of the words would be reversed, this induced set greatly increased their accuracy of percep­tion.
Everyday living is full of examples of set as an important determinant of what one perceives. After hearing the words "ham and " you are se: to hear '·eggs." You are set to hear "beans" if you hear "pork and" first. And you will be likely to hear "beans" even if the word actually spoken is "greens." Some persons say that they cannot sleep because their hearts pound in their ears or because of the ticking of a bedside clock. Most of us are scarcely aware of this pounding an ticking. The insomniac, however, is looking for explanations for his sleeplessness and so is set for many types of stimulation which ar disregarded by most people. Everyone will hear the ticking clock anL beatir:g heart if he sets himself to listen for them. The doctor generally hears the telephone ring in the night, but not the baby's crying. His wife, however, will sleep through the ringing telephone but waken to the stirring and crying of the baby.

The Needs that We Need!

Human Needs
Perceptions are largely determined by needs and desires. In other words, we see what we want to see. Like the mirrors at amusement parks, we distort the world; the distortion is in relation to our needs and desires. Perceptual behavior is no exception to the all-pervasive influence of needs.
The influence of need in shaping perception has frequently been studied in the experimental laboratory. An example is a study In which subjects in various stages of hunger were asked to report what they saw in ambiguo:ls black and white drawings flashed before them for very short periods of time. The results of the expedment showed that as hunger increased up to a certain point, the subjects saw more and more of the ambiguous figures as articles of food. Thus the hungry subjects "saw" more steaks, salads, and have sandwiches than subjects who had just eaten.
For all everyday example of the effects of needs on perception, consider two men looking through a store window at a display of automobile accessories. One man needs a tire and the other some antifreeze. Both men are exposed to the same objects ir: the window display. The first will notice the bland; tread, and price of the tires and generally neglect the other objects. The second will be able to tell you all about the antifreeze preparations and will have little informatio about anything else. What was clearly perceived by each of these
was detennined by his particular need. If you need to buy a car, yo will see structural characteristics, colors, and styling of automobiles that are missed completely by a person who has no interest in buying a car.

Human Qualities: Emotions, Perceptions and Attention

Emotions, Perceptions and Attention
A person's emotional state-whether he is angry, happy, sad, or excited-has a lot to do with his perception. A strong emotion, such as fear, can make a person perceive danger on all sides. People have been known to shoot bushes, trees, and, fense posts when they anticipated danger. Such common expressions as "blind rage," "love is blind," and "paralyzing fear" dl'scrJbe the influence which emotion may have on a person's perception of a Iiituation and his reaction to it.
Influence Without Awareness 
In a study on emotion and perception, children at a summer camp judged the characteristics of faces in photographs before and after playing a "scary" game of "murder." The amount of maliciousness or evil seen by the C'hildren in the faces was much greater after the game than before. The emotional state aroused by the game caused the youngsters to perceive the faces differently than before.
Emotional states may even operate at a level so primitive that they influence perception before the individual is aware of the stimu­lus. This is indicated by an experiment in which subjects studied a list of nonsense syllables. Certain of these syllables were always accom­panied by an electric shock on the subject's hand. Shock normally induces an electrical skin response which can be accurately recorded. After a number of pairings of syllable and shock it was possible to omit the shock and get the electrical skin response by presenting only the syllable. Now the experimenter presented the syllables in an exposure device for extremely short periods of time. The subjects gave the electrical sldn response before they recognized the syllable. For syllables that were not accompanied originally by shock, the effect was not nearly so pronounced. It would seem that the shock syllables came to be threatening syllables, and their general fearful character was perceived before the detailed makeup of the syllables themselves.
ATTENTION
At this point in your reading about perception, it should be clear that in getting to know the world one selects or filters out stimuli from the sense organs and organizes them in a meaningful way. We use certain stimuli and reject others or else relegate them to minor roles. The fact that the perceiver picks out certain kinds of stimuli is another way of saying that he attends to only a few at n time. When you pay attention, you focus your attention on something. What, now, are the conditions which cause us to focus on what is going on in the outside world? Y should have some ready answers. One's past experience, sets, need, and emotions play important roles. And so does the way the world is organjzed in tenns of figure and ground, similarity, nearness, other principles of organization. But certain additional caus attention warrant specific mention, especially in view of their use in applied psychology.
Factors In Attention 
The changing quality of a stimulating situation makes us focus on it. Change attracts attention: change from one color to another; chang from present to absent; change from one intensity to another; chan from moving to stationary; change from big to small. Your cat igno the stationary ball of yarn but pounces on it when it moves. Yo scarcely notice the traffic noises on a busy street, but if the volume o. traffic decreases, the "quiet" attracts your attention.
Repetitiveness is another determinant of attention. "Help, help, help!" will attract attention when a single "Help!" would pas noticed. Repeated taps on the shoulder attract attention more su than a single signal. A weak stimulus frequently repeated may more effective than a strong one presented only once. But ther limits to the effectiveness of repetition. If a stimulus is repeated times, it ceases to hold attention, because of its monotony, or yiel some other stimulus that has the advantage of novelty and change.
Intensity, of course, is a powerful determiner of attentlon. When we are not focusing on anything in particular, we are likely t notice the loudest noise, a bright flash over a faint twinkle, the most pungent perfume. With visible objects, size has the same effect intensity. Small details are less likely to catch the attention than large objects.
Some stimuli are more potent than others in attracting attention because of their novelty or unusual quality. Recall how attent demanding is a dog who runs onto the football field during a game. A new suit or hat, the smell of smoke where usually there is none-all these are examples of attention arrest by unusual or novel stimuli.
Difference of contrast, somewhat like change, contributes t the focusing of perception. Anything that is different from its gen surroundings stands out and catches the eye: a hole in the carpet, smudge on a smooth wall, a dark spot in a bright landscape, a small pebble inside one's shoe.
Social suggestions may cause people to attend to a particul stimulus. You probably know the old stunt in which several studentf. gazing intently at an ordinary notice on a bulletin board soon attr crowd. And perhaps you have tried the prank of looking intently at the sky, moving your head slowly in a wide arc, and having other people do the same thing even w!len there is nothing of interest to see. People pond to social suggestions by paying close attention to something hich other persons are apparently observing.

Attention and Perception - A Psychological Overview

Attention and Perception
At this point in your reading about perception, it should be clear that in getting to know the world one selects or filters out stimuli from the sense organs and organizes them in a meaningful way. We use certain stimuli and reject others or else relegate them to minor roles. The fact that the perceiver picks out certain kinds of stimuli is another way of saying that he attends to only a few at n time. When you pay attention, you focus your attention on something. What, now, are the conditions which cause us to focus on what is going on in the outside world? Y should have some ready answers. One's past experience, sets, need, and emotions play important roles. And so does the way the world is organjzed in tenns of figure and ground, similarity, nearness, other principles of organization. But certain additional caus attention warrant specific mention, especially in view of their use in applied psychology.
Factors In Attention
The changing quality of a stimulating situation makes us focus on it. Change attracts attention: change from one color to another; chang from present to absent; change from one intensity to another; chan from moving to stationary; change from big to small. Your cat igno the stationary ball of yarn but pounces on it when it moves. Yo scarcely notice the traffic noises on a busy street, but if the volume o. traffic decreases, the "quiet" attracts your attention.

Repetitiveness is another determinant of attention. "Help, help, help!" will attract attention when a single "Help!" would pas noticed. Repeated taps on the shoulder attract attention more su than a single signal. A weak stimulus frequently repeated may more effective than a strong one presented only once. But ther limits to the effectiveness of repetition. If a stimulus is repeated times, it ceases to hold attention, because of its monotony, or yiel some other stimulus that has the advantage of novelty and change.
Intensity, of course, is a powerful determiner of attentlon. When we are not focusing on anything in particular, we are likely t notice the loudest noise, a bright flash over a faint twinkle, the most pungent perfume. With visible objects, size has the same effect intensity. Small details are less likely to catch the attention than large objects.
Some stimuli are more potent than others in attracting attention because of their novelty or unusual quality. Recall how attent demanding is a dog who runs onto the football field during a game. A new suit or hat, the smell of smoke where usually there is none-all these are examples of attention arrest by unusual or novel stimuli.
Difference of contrast, somewhat like change, contributes t the focusing of perception. Anything that is different from its gen surroundings stands out and catches the eye: a hole in the carpet, smudge on a smooth wall, a dark spot in a bright landscape, a small pebble inside one's shoe.
Social suggestions may cause people to attend to a particul stimulus. You probably know the old stunt in which several studentf. gazing intently at an ordinary notice on a bulletin board soon attr crowd. And perhaps you have tried the prank of looking intently at the sky, moving your head slowly in a wide arc, and having other people do the same thing even w!len there is nothing of interest to see. People pond to social suggestions by paying close attention to something hich other persons are apparently observing.

Influence Without Awareness

Influence Without Awareness 
In a study on emotion and perception, children at a summer camp judged the characteristics of faces in photographs before and after playing a "scary" game of "murder." The amount of maliciousness or evil seen by the C'hildren in the faces was much greater after the game than before. The emotional state aroused by the game caused the youngsters to perceive the faces differently than before.
Emotional states may even operate at a level so primitive that they influence perception before the individual is aware of the stimu­lus. This is indicated by an experiment in which subjects studied a list of nonsense syllables. Certain of these syllables were always accom­panied by an electric shock on the subject's hand. Shock normally induces an electrical skin response which can be accurately recorded. After a number of pairings of syllable and shock it was possible to omit the shock and get the electrical skin response by presenting only the syllable. Now the experimenter presented the syllables in an exposure device for extremely short periods of time. The subjects gave the electrical sldn response before they recognized the syllable. For syllables that were not accompanied originally by shock, the effect was not nearly so pronounced. It would seem that the shock syllables came to be threatening syllables, and their general fearful character was perceived before the detailed makeup of the syllables themselves.

What are Human Distraction?

Human Distrations' Psychology
It is appropriate to discuss in this chapter the influence of distracting timuli on behavior because distraction simply means changing the focus of perception or attending to something else. Everyone has had difficulty in directing his attention because of flashing lights, loud noises, odors, gossip, or other kinds of distracting stimuli.
When the stimulus causing the distraction acts upon the same sense organ that is concerned with attention, we run into trouble. Thus outside noises interfere greatly when one is talking over the :elephone, but flashing lights may have little distracting effect.
Of course not all distraction comes from the outside. It is difficult to attend to what you are doing if you are worried, afraid, or excited. In this connection it has been found that taxicab drivers who ad family worries were more likely t.o have accidents than those who did not. The accidents occurred becawle the worried drivers were unable to meet the attention requirements of safe driving.
From a practical standpoint,. the control of distraction is im­portant because a person's efficiency may be reduced by stimuli that take attention away from his job. The accident incurred by the taxi driver is a case in point. In one stuqy, the actual cost of distraction ",vas determined in terms of the energy required to perform a unit of work. Typists worked under two conditions: some days surrounded by soundproof walls; other days in the same place except that the partitions were removed, allowing the usual noises to prevail. The energy cost was measured by having the typists breathe into a bag so constructed as to capture tpe expired air. The air was then analyzed for the amount of carbon dioxide, and from this, oxygen consumption has determined. The amount of typing accomplished under the quiet and noisy conditions was the same, but. the energy cost was much greater under the noisy condition.

Human Illusions and Psychology

Illusions and Psychology
When something goes wrong in either the physical or the mental world, the underlying reasons for the mishap may be more easily seen than when everything is running srnoothly. For this reason we can learn something regarding the process of perception from a study of illusions. An illusion is a surprising error of perception. We ence illusions when a stimulus is so misleading that we fall trap and get a false meaning from the signs received by our organs.
You can easily demonstrate one of the oldest of illusion shutting your eyes, crossing two fmgers, and running a pencil tween the fingers. Your perception will such that you are aware of two pencils being run over your fingers instead of one. This occurs because, in the past, when the fingers were stimulated on their outside edges, the stimuli came from two objects, not from one. In other words, this il due to habit and familiarity derived from prior experience. You should be reminded at this point of our earlier discussion about th portance of past experience in shaping all our perceptions.
Familiarity and habit give rise to what is known as the" reader's illusion." In learning to read, we respond to larger and larger patterns-words, sentences, paragraphs. Once these habits a lished, they persist in the face of error. This means that a word perceived as such even when it is spelled incorrectly. The re for the meaning, responds to a few cues and reads on, not notiel: printer's error. If the word as printed has enough resemblance t right word, it arouses the same response. In the effort to print perfectly, proofreaders are employed whose job is to look specific for printer's errors. This means that the proofreader must ig tendency to perceive whole units and must concentrate on th ments. But so deeply ingrained is the old habit that even the professional falls into the trap of the proofreader's illusion and makes errors.
An illusion familiar to everyone is experienced at the moives. Actually, not pictures in motion but ext are projected on the screen. The seen the viewer; in other words it must be the can readily demonstrate apparent motion about 3 inches in front of your nose and looking at it while blinking first one eye and then the other. To the one side and to the right eye, more to closing one eye and simultaneol\sly seems to move across your field of v illustration of the general tendency to trying to combine successive stqt!o whole, the observer creates a sense of movement between the stimulated unmoving points.
There is a variety of common visual illusions. In the Poggendorf illusion the continuity of a line is interrupted by narrow strips laid across it at an anlgle. You can easily see what effect is given to the character of the line. An interest­ing error occurs in the ring segments illusion. The two arcs are drawn with lines of the same length, but the misleading effect of the spatial separation of one from the other is clearly apparent.
Illusions are extreme instances of the difference between what is "out there" and what we perceive to be "out there." Illusions dramatically illustrate that perception can play tricks on us. The point to be remembered is that the world as people see it is not necessarily the world as it really is. We must be concerned with what people see ill addition to what we show them; with what they hear besides what we say to them. Whether we feel hot or cold depends largely on us, not on the thermometer.

Perception and Advertising

Advertising and Perception
Nowhere are the basic principles of perception applied more forcefully fully than in advertising. Printed advertisements, regardless of media, involve tile eye exclusively. Radio advertising, in contrasl, depends on the ear, and television involves both the eye and the ear. Let us illu.strate with some studies showing how advertising selling are related to some of the principles of perception.
Two investigators measured the relevance of illustration to copy in thirty-nine advertisements appearing in House Beautiful and House and Garden. The pictures were cut from the copy and mount on a white-cardboard background. College student subjects w asked to indicate whether they had or had not seen each of tl pictures before. They were asked what product was featured in th picture and what caught their attention. The product judged co most often was the conspicuous, and in most cases the centen object; judged correctly next most often was the trademark. product and its trademark stood out and were emembered best there were fewer distracting objects in the picture. Plain, representation of the product was characteristic. Further, these pictures contained within their borders printed words which t spelled out the desirable features of the product. The human subject in the illustrations reflected happiness and contentment in their faces. The investigators concluded that not only must an advert ment be perceived, its message must be understood. Word choic sentence structure are vital to understanding.
In a spot-advertising study, a packaged-drugs firm was int ested in detenniningthe effectiveness of its spots. Key words were taken from sample advertisements, and subjects were asked to free-associate with each. The final question posed was, "What product service does this remind you of?" For example, when male and femal subjects were asked to free-associate with the word "membrane, 42 percent responded with "form of skin or tissue." Also a mil!: emotional attitude was found; 57 percent of the subjects expressed like and 42 percent dislike. The most frequent response to the phrase "shrinks swollen nasal membranes" was "colds." Further, the word had a high brand-associative value for the company.
The research indicated that very favorable feelings existed toward such words and phrases as "penetrating ingredient," "lates," and "gives you a lut." Such words as "antiseptic" and "medicates" .aroused favorable responses, whereas unfavorable reactions were elicited by "bacteria," "congestion," and "inflamed." The researchers noted that when negative emotions are involved, the advertisement should provide a way out. The results of studies of radio spot ads are in effect .similar. The "voice" of the announcer means much with regard to what feelings will be aroused.
In a very real way perception relates to many aspects of con­sumer behavior. Let us take a look at the role of psychology in this area.

What is the Psychology of Communication and Language Usage?

Communication and Language Usage 
On the level of vocabulary and language usage, Bergen Evans has made some valuable comments. He stresses the importance of the nuts and bolts of vocabulary to a person in fully expressing himself. Unless it is suppressed, the colorful (if sometimes inaccurate) speech of children comes naturally. At suppertime, a four-year-old was heard to say, "I'm as hungry as a car without gas." By taking the time to listen, a parent can help a child stretch his imagination and his vocabulary at the same time. This leads to one of Evans' major points:
An increased vocabulary makes learning easier. This statement makes a lot of sense, since you can neither understand what you are reading, nor reproduce what you have learned, if you lack the vocabulary. The use of a dictionary shouldn't be a shameful sign of. not knowing something, but a positive sign of wanting to improve. The mature person will admit he doesn't know an answer, but then looks until he finds it. Teachers would much rather be given a paper using specific terms than vague generalities. Evans emphasizes that a good vocabulary goes a long way toward avoiding misunderstandings, besides adding clarity and variety to speech or writing. He even states that in addition to the simple pleasure of using a well-chosen word, yocabulary largely shapes the decisions we make. The cliche "Words fail me," is sadly often true. Most people admire the person with a good vocabulary, if it isn't accompanied by a superior attitude. Further, Evans says that the ability to increase vocabulary throughout life is a "sure reflection of intellectual progress." And, most important for our purpose, The better control we have over words, the more successful our adjust­ment is likely to be."

Artistary in Communication - A Psychological Overview

Artistic Communication
On a less obvious level; communication does not need to involve speech or conversation at all It may be the passing along of one man's ideas and perceptions on an emotional level through his art. On this level, the cliche "A picture is worth a thousand words" is certainly true. A newspaper photo of a man's h-and dripping with oil sludge after being dipped in Lake Michigan sparked the "Save the Lake" campaign in that area, leading to multimillion dollar antipollution proposals. No words were needed to arouse public interest in the situation.
The music of today's youth, probably more than that of other eras, serves as an outlet for their feelings on life, and should not be too lightly dismissed as "noise." Despite a number of banalities, and some works recorded for the sheer pleasure of rhythm, there are others which carry a serious message. "The Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel and "Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan are examples from past years, and more appear all the time. The quasi-religious revival in some sectors could be seen in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar of 1970. The phenomenal success of such songs or hymns as "Amazing Grace" and "Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man" are further evidence of this. Songs openly or indirectly referring to the drug scene can be heard, as well as many questioning establishment values. A parent truly concerned with communication, with his teen. ager could do worse than listen. The titles and emphasis will change, but the effectiveness of their communication probably will not.
Literature, movies, painting, and sculpture as media of expres­sion are also genuine communication, whether anyone agrees with the "message" or not. Andy Warhol's faithfully copied painting of a soup can and his elaborately tongue-in-cheek movies show a phil. osophy of a different sort. The paintings of Norman Rockwell are seen ·hopeles.sly saccharine to some and appealingly true to life to others,
but they are the communication of his views. The "minimal" sculp­ture and "junk" sculpture of recent years could also be seen as communication of a sort without overly stretching the imagination. The man who covered the whole side of a cliff with plastic wrap had a message for some.