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ORNAMENT AND DISTRACTION: PERIPHERAL AESTHETICS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2017
Extract
In the section devoted to “Attention” in The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James describes how the “‘adaptation of the attention’” can alter our perception of an image so as to permit multiple visual formulations (417). In his example of a two-dimensional drawing of a cube, we can see the three-dimensional body only once our attention has been primed by “preperception”: the image formed by the combination of lines has “no connection with what the picture ostensibly represents” (419, 418). In a footnote to this passage, however, James uses an example from Hermann Lotze's Medicinische Psychologie (1852), to show how a related phenomenon can occur involuntarily, and in states of distraction rather than attention:
In quietly lying and contemplating a wall-paper pattern, sometimes it is the ground, sometimes the design, which is clearer and consequently comes nearer. . .all without any intention on our part. . . .Often it happens in reverie that when we stare at a picture, suddenly some of its features will be lit up with especial clearness, although neither its optical character nor its meaning discloses any motive for such an arousal of the attention. (419)
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