OBSERVATION TESTS

Evening Star, Issue 19615, 22 July 1927, Page 2

OBSERVATION TESTS

STRIKING EXPERIMENTS. Tho man who goes into tho witness box and describes some scene ho saw weeks before may honestly believe that he is giving a true account of it. As a matter of fact, it may be something of tho kind. Ask a dozen men to describe the pictures on the walls of thei drawing rooms in which they have spent thousands of hours, and the probability is that scarcely one of them could pass tho tost satisfactorily. A man may look at his watch many times daily for years and bo unable to say accurately in what form the hour of six appears on its dial—whether VI, or 6, or those numerals inverted. Thousands are prepared to swear that the numeral appears on their watches though it may hot be there at all. A striking experiment, which illustrates this lack of observation, was made out long ago. Dr Clapaiede, Professor of at the University of Geneva, asked his fifty-four pupils whether a window, the appearance and locality of which he described minutely, was to be seen in the university buildings. It was a very large and conspicuous window, of peculiar shape, i Hich every one of his students passed several times daily. Forty-four declared that no such window existed, two were doubtful, and only eight identified it. In another experiment a small landscape picture, with well-defined features —a church, a hill, a clump of trees, and so cm—was shown for 30sec to each of twenty students, who, nest day, were asked to describe it as accurately as possible. Of the twenty, only two were able to give a fairly accurate description of it. ’ Sixteen omitted or misdescribed ono or more of the leading features of the picture, and two were hopelessly wrong. In another experiment, Professor Claparede arranged for a masked man, grotesquely dressed 5 to enter the room and shout and gesticulate until he was ejected—a startling incident which caused no little excitement.

The intruder was put out within twenty seconds, and the professor did not refer to the incident until a week later, when he put to the students a series of thirteen questions designed to test their observation of the strange intruder. ; Was he wearing a hat, and if so,. what color was it? What was the color of his hair? What was no carrying in his hands? How was be dressed? Was he wearing gloves or a neck-tie? What was his mask like? Nino of the students declared he was not wearing a hat. The remainder variously described the color as black, brown, grey, and white. Eleven gave the color of his hair, though it was not visible; and when ten masks of various types were shown to them not .one of the twenty-five were able to pick out the puo penally worn by the intruder.