Anthropology and Psychology in the Lab, Field, and Garden

• In Event: Across the Senses: Human Sciences and their Material Conditions circa 1900

Abstract

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a methodological controversy emerged around the scientific problem of understanding human color vision in evolutionary terms. While the first experimental psychology laboratories were being constructed in Western Europe and North America to subtend a natural science of mind, zoologists and ethnologists were simultaneously researching color vision among populations outside Europe. The “colour-sense controversy” crystalized among experimentalists seeking an understanding of human color vision in ontogenetic and phylogenetic terms. To build a natural science of mind capable of accounting for visual perception and attendant forms of cognition, these experimentalists moved between psychological laboratories, anthropological expeditions and field sites, and experimental apparatus which some built in their own homes and gardens. This paper shows that an overlooked product of the colour-sense controversy was the methodological specification of “Looking Time” (a combination of direction and duration of optic fixations) as a scientific measure of perception and cognition—a measure that has been crucial to developmental and comparative psychology, especially since the 1980s (Baillargeon et al. 2015; Cohen and Cashon 2003). At the turn of the twentieth century, experimentalists argued that measures of Looking Time provided access to the nonverbal minds of human infants, and authorized research among linguistically-diverse populations. While Looking Time is usually thought to have emerged more recently, analytic attention to the material stuff of psychological experimentation, and experimental materializations of nonverbal minds, reveals Looking Time’s methodological specification in research concerned with visual perception decades before disciplinary histories have long claimed.

Author

• Cameron Brinitzer, History & Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania