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![Adelbert Ames II (1880-1955) was an American lawyer and artist who was known for his discoveries in optical physiology and perceptual psychology.
In 1928, while at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, he diagnosed a visual dysfunction called aniseikonia which resulted in the founding of the Dartmouth Eye Institute.
Later, in the 1940s and 50s, he developed nearly thirty experiments in perceptual psychology, now commonly referred to as the Ames demonstrations. These ingenious laboratory setups, which are still commonly cited in psychology textbooks, were highly unusual, and they prompted extended discussions among psychologists, philosophers, educators, and artists (Behrens 1994, 1998).
Fritz Heider (1896-1988) was a Viennese-born Gestalt psychologist, and a colleague of Kurt Koffka at Smith College, where he taught for sixteen years, beginning in 1930. Heider left Smith to join the faculty at the University of Kansas, where he wrote an influential text on The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, in which he applied Gestalt theory to social psychology. In 1983, after his retirement, he recalled his experiences in a memoir titled The Life of a Psychologist: An Autobiography (Heider 1983), and in 1987-88, portions of his notebooks were also published (Benish-Weiner 1987, 1988).
In Heider’s autobiography, he recalls a series of meetings he had with Ames, the first of which appears to have taken place at Dartmouth, where the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association was held in 1936.
Not formally trained in psychology, Ames’ research had been outside that profession in the sense that he was not often directly in touch with professional psychologists. When the APA gathered at Dartmouth, Heider recalls, "Ames was hopeful that he could get some of the bigwigs interested in his work." As a result, "he invited some of them to his laboratory [on the Dartmouth campus]; but when he showed them his demonstrations, they only shook their heads and said: ‘Very amusing, but we are sorry. What you have there are optical illusions that have been well known to psychology for a long time. All these problems were solved thirty years ago’" (Heider 1983, 140).
Heider does not say which of his demonstrations Ames exhibited at the APA meeting, but undoubtedly one of the things that he showed was a monocular distorted room. Conceived in 1934 by Ames and first constructed (by his technical assistant, Kimball Whipple) in 1935, the Ames room (as it is now commonly known) is a cleverly misshapen room interior which—providing it is observed through a designated peephole—appears to be perfectly normal in shape. However, viewed from any position other than the peephole, it is evident that the room is extraordinarily distorted: The right wall, for example, is only one half the height of the left wall, and the back wall is clearly a trapezoid, not a rectangle.
As a result, objects placed within the room appear either to shrink or to grow as they are moved from one corner to another, tilted surfaces appear flat, and trapezoids look rectangular.
Further, a marble placed within a trough in the room appears to violate gravity by rolling uphill, while liquid poured from one container to another appears to be strangely displaced to the side.
And if a subject (while still looking through the peephole) is instructed to touch the back corners of the room with a lecturer’s stick, the result is an awkward sensation in which the person’s visual reality (the perception of the room as normal) is blatantly at odds with his or her kinesthetic reality, so that, predictably, the subject bangs into the wall with the stick on the right side and falls short of touching the wall on the left (Ittelson 1968, 184-189; Behrens 1994).
The second meeting of Ames and Heider took place in the summer of 1945. While teaching at MIT, Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, whom Heider had known in Berlin, was invited to visit Ames’s laboratory in Hanover, and he asked Heider to go along.
"At that time," recalls Heider, "I was fond of a little demonstration that I had made which showed that one can produce the experience of a three-dimensional cube by means of a two-dimensional drawing seen from a particular angle. I do not mean just a drawing of a cube, but a setup that gives one the experience of having a real cube in front of one’s eyes" (Heider 1983, 140-141).
Heider’s description is confusing. More than likely his demonstration was neither a cube nor a drawing, but an anamorphic wire construction. Anamorphosis or "forced perspective" is a kind of distortion that European artists and stage designers have used since the 15th century. In conventional linear perspective, a painting (or other artwork) is normally viewed from the front. In anamorphic constructions, the picture appears distorted when seen frontally, even indecipherable, the image becoming intelligible only from an eccentric point of view, such as the edge of the painting (Baltrusaitis 1977; Behrens 1994).
Scores of historic examples exist of anamorphic artworks. Among the best known is a perspective cabinet at the National Gallery in London. Titled Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House, it was created around 1656 by Samuel van Hoogstraten, a pupil of Rembrandt. In this anamorphic simulation of a room interior, all sorts of dramatic distortions are seen when the front wall of the cabinet is removed (the image of a dog, for example, is partly painted on the floor, partly on an adjacent wall). But when the box is closed and one looks only through a designated peephole, the view is that of a normal, undistorted room interior (Brusati 1995).
Even from a verbal description, the resemblance between the Ames room and Van Hoogstraten’s room is apparent. The former is obviously an anamorphic construction, although there is no evidence that Ames was aware of or influenced by Dutch perspective cabinets. Nor did Heider apparently make a connection between anamorphic art and the Ames demonstrations when he first saw them. But years later he did, as is confirmed by the following notebook entry (added after 1978): "National Gallery London: S. van Hoogstraten, 1627-1678; box with peepholes, illusion of rooms, like Ames" (Benesh-Weiner 1988, 235).
In the summer of 1945, when Lewin and he visited Ames at his Hanover laboratory, writes Heider, "I showed Ames one of these [cube] demonstrations, and I explained how he could build different setups that would all give the impression of three-dimensional cubes although they would actually be different wire models that would have no similarity to cubes except when each was seen from a specific angle" (Heider 1983, 141).
To better understand anamorphoses, including Heider’s cube demonstration and the Ames room, it may help to realize that anamorphic phenomena are experienced daily, and that among the most common examples are constellations.
In the Big Dipper, for example, the distance of the farthest star (Alkaid) is 210 light-years, while the star adjacent to it (Mizar) is only 88 light-years away. Despite such phenomenal separation, we perceive these stars (as viewed from our "peephole" position on Earth) as lying next to one another on a perpendicular plane. Through calculated manipulation, any number of different stars, of varying size and brightness, could theoretically be placed at different distances from the Earth to create the same retinal image as does the Big Dipper. Indeed, as art historian E.H. Gombrich writes, stellar constellations "may be described as a gigantic Ames experiment which nature has set up for man" (Gombrich 1982, 207). More…](ChairDemo_files/shapeimage_5.png)
