Phantoms at the Holiday Inn

Abstract

ety), but like VSS it was originally held in Florida at a beach front hotel. The current ARVO is a staid affair, having drifted away from Florida and its original mission, and now attended mostly by ophthalmologists, but in its early era it was an interdisciplinary hot bed of vision research, wildly successful undoubtedly because of its location on beautiful white sand beaches. In 1977, it was the fi rst vision conference I attended and I was doing my best to keep up and make sense of the fl ood of new ideas and excitement. The meeting room was a Holiday Inn conference venue perched on the Lido Key beach facing the Gulf of Mexico. Much of our day, at least noon to 4 pm was spent on that beach talking and playing but now, later in the day, we were on the top fl oor of the hotel and the room was packed to hear Naomi Weisstein. This was not science as I knew it. Her talk was punchy, full of jokes and new ideas about visual cognition, phantoms, and a demonstration. A show-stopping demonstration. Off went the room lights and up came a movie (no videos at that time) of vertical strips of Xs interrupted in the middle by a dark horizontal band (Figure 2.1). “Look at the way the light and dark bars complete across the strip,” she said, and there was a murmur of agreement. Magical phantoms crossed the gap, which I learned later had been previously reported (Tynan & Sekuler, 1975). But forget that, Naomi was telling us that not only were there phantoms, but they also generated motion aftereffects in the gap where nothing had been present. These fi ndings were reported in December of that year in a Science paper (Weisstein et al., 1977). On the left is an original frame digitized from the 1977 demonstration movie with arrows overlaid to indicate the motion (see Movie 1 in the list at end of chapter). In the center is a close up depiction of what the authors, Weisstein, Maguire, and Berbaum (1977) claimed they and their observers saw – light and 2