ABSTRACT
Brent Ruben has drawn an important distinction between the use of the concept of feedback to describe one-way relationships and its use in describing reciprocal relationships. Goal-changing feedback reveals its more general role in preserving continuity and stability in the larger social system through altering the goals or settings of significant social groups within it. In retrospect, the demonstrations are rich evidence for how feedback functions in perception to stabilize visual relation to the world about people. The importance of feedback control in maintaining a stable relationship between perceptions and experience seems partly confirmed by the efforts of Adelbert Ames to undermine confidence. Adelbert Ames, Jr., was a New York ophthalmologist who worried his colleagues by his ceaseless efforts to create in normal people the sorts of perceptual distortion most specialists did their best to correct in their patients. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson was invited to look into one of Ames's trapezoidal rooms.
