ABSTRACT
It was 1974, and I had been lecturing in Chile, in Santiago, the very centre of the insurrection against Salvador Allende, that within days of our rather hurried departure erupted into total mayhem. We had then travelled, fairly roughly with our 4-year-old daughter, up along the line of the Andes, through Bolivia and Peru. At the end of five or six weeks we were faced with a very long flight across the Atlantic via Paris to London, where we discovered that at some point our baggage had gone missing. When eventually matters were sorted out, and we were hurriedly reading various immigration information sheets and forms in a state of considerable fatigue, I noticed something rather strange; I seemed to see items that were not really there, or rather, were elsewhere but reasonably adjacent to where I was actively reading on the sheet. It was as if I was taking in information extrafoveally, away from the immediate point of fixation. This made me wonder whether normal readers, in a normal state rather than acutely fatigued, also might partly process material beyond their current point of fixation, perhaps subconsciously, but in a way such as to influence or bias whatever they at that very moment were directly attending to. So when I was established at Edinburgh University, where I was to spend six months sabbatical, I devised a simple experiment. It was in the days before personal or office computers, and if one wanted to flash material to a particular part of the retina, one used a device called a tachistoscope, a massively expensive device replete with lenses, timers and switches to project material, maybe in controlled sequences, to known retinal regions (as long as the experimental subject was fixating a central fixation point), for known durations. There was no such device, analogous to an electron microscope in a biology department, at Edinburgh, so I used an ordinary slide projector, with a carousel-type magazine, fitted over the lens with a solenoid-operated shutter. Stimuli, which were converted into transparencies, consisted of a centrally located word of ambiguous meaning (e.g. palm – tree or hand; bank – river or cash; box – container or fight …), with on one side a 143disambiguator (tree, cash, fight …), and on the other a meaningless string of consonant letters matched in length to the particular disambiguator on the other side. I flashed several hundred of such triplets for a duration too fast to permit any eye movement. The task was to report the central, ambiguous word, along with any word which would identify its immediately perceived meaning, and with anything else they had been able to see on the displayed stimulus. I ignored all trials where they reported the disambiguator itself. It emerged that even when unable to report the disambiguator, the meaning the participants tended to attribute to the central, ambiguous item was in line with the unreported disambiguator. I published the findings in the then very prestigious Journal of Experimental Psychology, noting that what one understood, during reading, was influenced by unconsciously processed material beyond the immediate point of fixation, the fovea. Fortunately, I added a caveat, that an alternate possibility was that very rapid forgetting might instead or additionally be operating. I say ‘fortunately’, because my main conclusion ran counter to the strongly espoused belief of a then very influential psycholinguist that nothing outside of fixation had any effect, conscious or otherwise. A good friend and colleague of mine then at Cambridge replicated and extended my findings, but neglected to invoke that little, critical caveat, and such were the professional jealousies that life was made very difficult for him thereafter.
