Experiment:
Determine how related and unrelated images impact a viewer’s ability to see an image made up of seemingly unrelated parts in increasing proximity to one another.
Participants:
1. Anna (Creative Administrator at work, 30).
2. Kelly (My roommate, 21).
3. Ian (Upstairs neighbor, 22).
Experiment Round One:
1. Anna went through all 20 slides and could not identify the horse and rider. She said that it looked like a man with giant shoulders.
2. Kelly could tell that the horse’s head was an animal head by slide 16, but could not figure out which animal it was.
3. Ian went through all 20 slides and could not see the image. When asked to take a stab at it, he said he saw pangea.
Experiment Round Two:
1. Anna went through all 20 slides again and could not figure out what the image was. When told that it was a horse and rider, she asserted that the image was too abstract to be considered a whole.
2. After seeing the images of the animals, Kelly saw the horse and rider by slide 10. She said that the rider was honestly a guess, and could tell that the animal was a horse from the implied movement of its legs and feet.
3. The addition of the animal images did not help Ian, and like Anna, he said that the final image did not represent a horse and rider at all.
Conclusion:
When I did this experiment, I could not see the horse and rider until they were clearly pointed out to me. Therefore, it is easy for me to believe that my subjects could not see it either. Perhaps Kelly has horses on the brain or a leftover horse obsession from her girlhood. I understand the logic behind this experiment, but I think that the image used definitely could have been more clear. (There is one image in particular that I have seen that looks like a set of splotches but is really a cow.) I do think that the related images did help, but so did seeing the slides for a second time.
