Copies may be circulated if this statement is included on each copy. The Innsbruck experiments seem to prove what Stratton many years ago was looking for but failed to demonstrate conclusively. Kohler has shown that a persistent abnormality of optical stimulation leads in the end to a reduction of the phenomenal abnormality of the world, and that a return to normal optical stimulation then yields a new phenomenal abnormality of the world of exactly the opposite kind. Kohler has disturbed, or distorted, or biased the optical stimulation not merely on one but in several different ways. These results strongly suggest that our perception of the surrounding world is modifiable.
Perception is subject to habituation.
It might follow that the environment looks stable and rigid, rectilinear and proper, only because we have made some sort of adjustment to it. The assumption that we somehow learn to perceive the spatial order of things is made even more plausible by such evidence. The notion that perceptions spring into existence full blown by way of native intuition is rendered less plausible than ever. It seems to me however that the results also support another assumption that our perception of the surrounding world is an exact function of stimulation. It is a bias or skew in the optical stimulation over the course of time that brings about a change in perception, and the change is a shift in the correspondence between stimulation and experience, not a disruption of the correspondence.