The Methods and Findings of Experiments on the Visual Discrimination of Shape by Animals (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from The Methods and Findings of Experiments on the Visual Discrimination of Shape by Animals Over the past 50 years, a great many experiments have been performed on the problem of the visual discrimination of shape by animals. The present monograph attempts to review this evidence. I was led to make this attempt because I had already gathered together much material from scattered sources in the course of my own work on this problem. There is little that is original in this review, but by making the data on shape discrimination available in one monograph, it is hoped that the labour of others in gathering and disentangling the evidence may be saved, and possibly some research problems in an important but neglected field will be suggested. It has not been possible to include all work on the visual discrimination of shapes in the bibliography since much of this work is outside the scope of this review. The main concern is with experiments the primary purpose of which is to throw light on the discriminability of shapes or the properties in terms of which they are discriminated by different species, and it is hoped that the references to such experiments are fairly complete up to the end of 1959, though some more recent papers have been included. In reviewing this body of complex and scattered work, it is certain that some errors will have been introduced: I would welcome any corrections that are offered. The writing of this monograph was undertaken as part of a project on "Stimulus analysing mechanisms". This project was formerly financed wholly by the Nuffield Foundation, and is currently financed jointly by the American Office of Naval Research (Contract N62558-2453) and the Nuffield Foundation: I am grateful to these bodies for their financial support. I am also grateful to the Royal Society for a grant in aid of the publication of this monograph. I have been helped at various stages in its preparation by a number of people and am particularly indebted to Mr. W. R. A. Muntz, Mr. A. Watson, Professor J. Z. Young, and Professor O. L. Zangwill for reading the manuscript and for making many valuable suggestions. I would also like to thank Miss Anne Carr for help in preparing the figures, Miss G. Brydone and Miss J. Scott for help in translating from German, Miss R. Williams for typing successive drafts, and Miss K. P. Watts for invaluable assistance in preparing the MS. for the press. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.