It all started for me (James) the spring of 1978, when, on the first day of my last required course for my undergraduate degree in psychology, Professor Naomi Weisstein introduced herself to her Sensation and Perception class and said “We’re going to study the mind!” “Really,” I said to myself, “now that sounds interesting”. Over the following weeks I realized I was hooked. This was very cool
... [Show full abstract] stuff, real psychological science. I needed to know more. I asked Dr. Weisstein after class how I might get more involved in this mind stuff. She directed me to her lab where her graduate students trained me to be an observer in their ongoing experiments. As it turned out the experiments Amanda and Mary Williams (no relation) trained me to run in were metacontrast masking studies exploring the temporal and configural nature of the object superiority effect. In the beginning I was truly a naïve observer in many ways. I wondered how what I was doing could possibly be of any help to them because I often felt I was simply guessing which of four target lines embedded in a figure I saw on each trial. Later during my first lab meeting, Naomi seemed thrilled with my results as much as I was amazed by them looking so systematic and similar to the other observer’s results. This was my first experience with and introduction to what Naomi later described to me as cognitive psychophysics.
