As instances of the extreme differences which may exist between individuals in perception of rather complex material exposed only for a short period of time, we may quote the following reports given by five intelligent and educated adults on seeing for about two seconds a reproduction of a picture by Walter Sickert, ‘Brighton Pierrots’.

1. 1. ‘A picture by a late nineteenth-century artist, the sort of thing one sees in the Leicester Galleries. A man standing in a straw hat, with nineteenth-century clothes, on an open space in front of a building, looking down. There were buildings at the back with a kind of portico, as if one were standing on the top of the steps of St Martin's-in-the-Fields. Possibly a picture by Sickert.’

2. 2. ‘A Cézanne, I think. A Spanish piazza with some sort of elevated platform on the left in the foreground. One male figure with a sombrero.’

3. 2. ‘A reproduction of a stage scene. Costume looked Elizabethan —at least, that of the man standing on the front of the stage did. An open-air theatre. An observer to the left of the stage looking across it; the audience on the right and in the background. In the foreground of the stage a figure of a man, and in the central background a girl in a much more modern dress like a country girl's, Victorian, pinkish-white in colour, with a full skirt and bodice. She seemed to be disappearing hurriedly at the back of the stage, looking backwards, as if escaping or trying to avoid notice.’

4. 4. ‘Might have been a platform, with a wooden post in the middle, going up to the top. On the right, a very tall figure in blue, who might have been wearing a blue cocked hat. Behind him there were houses. On the left there was a wall or a platform covered over, and a woman in white sitting. There was a general impression of a crowd of people about. It might have been an execution; possibly some kind of mediaeval picture or a historic scene.’

5. 5. ‘Rather a hazy picture of rather a thin wood on the left, and I think houses on the right. A man in mediaeval clothes or armour standing at the edge of the wood looking towards the buildings. I think there was a lady behind him in the wood.’