Upon operationally defining Levels  3,  4,  5, and  6, one encounters difficulty when attempting to demonstrate presence of behavior associated with these levels by means of a perceptual readiness test. Much controversy exists over the significance and reliability of tests of perceptual readiness which seek to demonstrate the role of motivational factors in perception.

The initial work of Postman, Bruner, and McGinnies⁷ open the door, in a sense, to a flood of discussion over the phenomenon of perceptual defense and readiness which extended throughout the decade of the 50’s. 

In the above experiment the authors found that the speed and ease with which a subject recognized word briefly presented in a tachistoscope operates as a function of the value areas these words represent, and of the interest the S’s in the experiment evinced in these value areas, as measured by the Allport-Vernon Study of Values. The latter tests for the relative dominance, within an individual, of the Spranger classification of religious, aesthetic, political, social, theoretical,  and economic interests. 

The experiment found that the greater the dominance of a value in the person, the more rapidly he would recognize words representing that area. Similarly, when presented with low-value words, the subject seemed to demonstrate some form of defensive avoidance. With high-value words, moreover, the subjects tended, in excess of chance, to propose guesses that were in the value area of the stimulus word prior to correct recognition. This observation was upheld by a subsequent finding of Bricker and Chapanis⁸ that subjects can obtain partial information from words below threshold.

Later work by Bruner and Postman⁹, and by McGinnies¹⁰ indicated the presence of a perceptual blocking or raising of thresholds for “taboo” words or those which were personally threatening.  These findings led to the concept of “perceptual defensive”  - - a kind of blocking of recognition for certain classes of materials personally and/or culturally unacceptable to the perceiver.

In opposition to this “motivational hypothesis” arose the “frequency hypothesis.” Solomon and Howes¹¹ presented findings that the effect of values on perception could be accounted for by the factor of frequency: that a person interested, for example, in religion, is more likely to have selective exposure to religious words. Howes then showed that the amount of time required to recognize a word could be expressed as a function of the log of the frequency with which the word appeared in the printed English language.¹²

However, this finding does not account for the observation that certain Individuals who are high, for example, in theoretical interests, recognize theoretical words more quickly than those words more frequently encountered in the printed language. Postman and Schneider showed that, for very common words drawn from the 6 value areas of the Allport-Vernon Test, the relative position of the values for the subject made little difference. However, among the rarer words, the subject tended to recognize the more valued ones more easily.¹³

<previous | 5 | next>