Re: Upside Down

[P3D Jeremy Hinton <Jeremy.Hinton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Subject: Re: World upside-down (not 3D but lets end this thing!)

Some (Marvin Jones for one) are understandably sceptical about 
the 'upside-down prism' experiments. Fair enough. If it was an 
urban legend then it had me going.... but it wouldn't have been 
the first time. So I checked:

These experiments were done by Richard Held at MIT.
Ref (Held R., (1965)'Plasticity in sensory-motor systems' Sci. Amer. 
_211_84-94, reproduced in a sci.am. book about 1972)

He was following C. S. Harris of Bell telephone labs:
Ref (Harris C.S. (1965) 'Perceptual adaptation to inverted, reversed, and 
displaced vision. Psychol. Rev. _72_ 419-444')

Harris got the idea from Helmholtz, who started this thread (amongst 
others)....!

By coincidence, I saw some reversing glasses at a conference recently. They 
were being used in a demonstration by a German chap, who turned out to be a 
stereo photographer. (Dr Wolf). Nice guy, of course. 

>I can't remember the citation either.  I do seem to 
>remember, however, that the subject's perception of 
>the world didn't actually flip; what happened
>was that their perceptual-motor linkages adapted 
>to that they were able to function normally in an 
>upside-down world.  Not positive, but that's what I
>remember...

>-Jim C.
Jim C - right again!


Jeremy



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