Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception: Adults’ Belief in Visual Emissions
📄 Original study📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
You know that feeling that your eyes are somehow reaching out and touching what you see? Turns out a staggering 41-67% of college students genuinely believe vision works by shooting something out of the eyes — like built-in flashlights. When asked to draw how seeing works, up to 86% sketched eye-beams. And here's the kicker: standard teaching barely dents this belief. Even specially designed lessons that directly confront the misconception only work temporarily — within a few months, students drift right back. The researchers think this stubborn idea stems from our raw, gut-level experience of vision feeling outward-directed. This matters for parapsychology debates too: claims about 'feeling someone staring at you' lean on exactly this folk intuition that eyes send out some kind of force, when really it's a deeply rooted misunderstanding of how sight actually works.
Abstract
The authors reviewed research about a profound misconception that is present among college students, namely, the belief that the process of vision includes emanations from the eyes, an idea that is consistent with the extramission theory of perception, which was originally professed by early Greek philosophers and which persisted in scholarly circles for centuries. The authors document the strength and breadth of this phenomenon and the abject failure of traditional educational techniques to overcome this belief, and they reveal that students are leaving psychology courses with a flawed understanding of one of the most studied processes in the history of psychology—visual perception. Some suggestions are offered for overcoming this misconception in traditional college classroom settings.
Links
Related Papers
Companion
- The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 2: Its Implications for Theories of Vision — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
- The Sense of Being Stared At, Part 1: Is It Real or Illusory? — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
- The Sense of Being Stared At: A Preliminary Meta-Analysis — Radin, Dean I (2005)
- Distant intentionality and the feeling of being stared at: Two meta-analyses — Schmidt, Stefan (2004)
- Experimenter Effects and the Remote Detection of Staring — Wiseman, Richard (1997)
More in Skeptical
Cognitive Styles and Psi: Psi Researchers Are More Similar to Skeptics Than to Lay Believers
Searching for the Impossible: Parapsychology's Elusive Quest
False-Positive Effect in the Radin Double-Slit Experiment on Observer Consciousness as Determined with the Advanced Meta-Experimental Protocol
Cross-Examining the Case for Precognition: Comment on Mossbridge and Radin (2018)
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine and the Pineal Gland: Separating Fact from Myth
📋 Cite this paper
Winer, Gerald A, Cottrell, Jane E, Gregg, Virginia, Fournier, Jody S, Bica, Lori A (2002). Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception: Adults’ Belief in Visual Emissions. American Psychologist. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066X.57.6-7.417
@article{winer_2002_misunderstanding_visual,
title = {Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception: Adults’ Belief in Visual Emissions},
author = {Winer, Gerald A and Cottrell, Jane E and Gregg, Virginia and Fournier, Jody S and Bica, Lori A},
year = {2002},
journal = {American Psychologist},
doi = {10.1037//0003-066X.57.6-7.417},
}