Value And Need As OrganizIng Factors In Perception (1947)

Classics in the History of Psychology

Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception (1947)
Jerome S. Bruner and Cecile C. Goodman[1]
Harvard University
First published in Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 42, 33-44.

Throughout the history of modern psychology, until very recent times, perception has been treated as though the perceiver were a passive recording instrument ofrather complex design. One might, in most experiments, describe him in much the same graphical terms as one uses to describe the latest piece of recording apparatus obtainable from Stoelting or the American Optical Company. Such psychology, practiced as it were in vitro, has fallen short of clarifying the nature of perception in everyday life much as did the old nerve-muscle psychophysiology fallshort of explaining behavior in everyday life. Both have been monumentally useful - in their place. The names of Weber, Fechner, Wundt, Titchener, Hecht, and Crozier are safely ensconced in any respectable psychological hall of fame. But their work, like the work of the nerve-muscle men, is only a beginning.
For, as Professor Thurstone (35) has put it, "In these days when we insist sofrequently on the interdependence of all aspects of personality, it would be difficult to maintain that any of these functions, such as perception, is isolated from the rest of the dynamical system that constitutes the person." The problem is, indeed, to understand how the process of perception is affected by other concurrent mental functions and how these functions in their turn are affected by theoperation of perceptual processes. Given a dark room and a highly motivated subject, one has no difficulty in demonstrating Korte's Laws of phenomenal movement. Lead the subject from the dark room to the market place and then find out what it is he sees moving and under what conditions, and Korte's Laws, though still valid, describe the situation about as well as the Laws of Color Mixture describe one'sfeelings before an El Greco canvas.
The discrepancy between the dark room and the market place we have in the past found it convenient to dismiss by invoking various dei ex machina: Attention, Apperception, Unbewusster Schluss, Einstellung, Preparatory Set, etc. Like the vengeful and unannounced step-brother from Australia in the poorer murder mysteries, they turn up at the crucial juncture todo the dirty work. Though such constructs are useful, perception itself must remain the primary focus. To shift attention away from it by invoking poorly understood intervening variables does little service. What we must study before invoking such variables are the variations perception itself undergoes when one is hungry, in love, in pain, or solving a problem. These variations are as much a partof the psychology of perception as Korte's Laws.
It is the contention of this paper that such perceptual phenomena are as scientifically measurable in terms of appropriate metrics as such more hallowed phenomena as flicker fusion, constancy, or tonal attributes. But let [p. 34] us pause first to construct a sketchy terminology. Let us, in what ensues, distinguish heuristically between two typesof perceptual determinants. These we shall call autochthonous and behavioral. Under the former we group those properties of the nervous system, highly predictable, which account for phenomena like simple pair formation, closure, and contrast, or at another level, tonal masking, difference and summation tones, flicker fusion, paradoxical cold, and binaural beats. Given ideal "dark-room" conditionsand no compelling distractions, the "average" organism responds to set physical stimuli in these relatively fixed ways. Autochthonous determinants, in brief, reflect directly the characteristic electrochemical properties of sensory end organs and nervous tissue.
Under the category of behavioral determinants we group those active, adaptive functions of the organism which lead to the governance...