Observations and experiments on the nature of perception in schizophrenia have appeared at least since the time of Kraepelin1 and Bleuler,2 who variously and somewhat contradictorily claimed both change and no change in the perception of the schizophrenic. Others have pointed to specific sensory disturbances, for example, Rosenfeld3,4 who felt stereognosis to be defective in catatonia. Few more recent writers, Arieti5 excepted, have commented on the perceptual problem at all from the clinical standpoint.
Perception and Psychology
This relative dearth of papers recently fails to reflect the advances of the past few years in experimental perceptual psychology. Adams6 as early as 1923 made clear that any simple stimulus-response formulation failed to make use of vital, but subtle, data in the relationship of the observed object to the memory of past experience, in that an object assumed to be a certain color from previous data persisted