Abstract
Luria (Luria, Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations, Harvard University Press, 1976) famously observed that people who never learnt to read and write do not perceive visual illusions. We conducted a conceptual replication of the Luria study of the effect of literacy on the processing of visual illusions. We designed two carefully controlled experiments with 161 participants with varying literacy levels ranging from complete illiterates to high literates in Chennai, India. Accuracy and reaction time in the identification of visual shape and color illusions and the identification of appropriate control images were measured. Separate statistical analyses of Experiments 1 and 2 as well as pooled analyses of both experiments do not provide any support for the notion that literacy affects the perception of visual illusions. Our large sample, carefully controlled study strongly suggests that literacy does not meaningfully affect the identification of visual illusions and raises some questions about other reports of cultural effects on illusion perception.
Highlights
Psychology, the study of human behavior, is not immune to the influences of Zeitgeist and the dominant political movements and ideologies of the time
These raw accuracies misrepresent the behavioral data we recorded in an important way: in the illusion condition, we score participant responses as ‘‘correct’’ if they correspond with the ground truth
Experiment 1 was part of a larger test battery that was administered to Tamil participants of varying literacy status
Summary
Psychology, the study of human behavior, is not immune to the influences of Zeitgeist and the dominant political movements and ideologies of the time. Influenced by the ideas of Lev Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, and the founding of the Soviet Union, they embarked on a radical quest for a ‘new psychology’ towards the ‘socialist alteration’ for the ‘new man’ (Yasnitzky, 2019). A main project of the Vygotsky-Luria ‘utopian science of the superman of the communist future’ (Yasnitzky, 2019) was Luria’s large-scale investigation of the effects of the rapid and forced ‘modernization’ and collectivization (i.e. adopting a Soviet model of cooperative agriculture) on cognition in illiterate peasants in Uzbekistan in 1931–1932. Vygotsky and Luria believed that modernization in the Soviet Union, including changes in the education system, would lead directly to a revolution in cognitive activity because all cognitive processes, they proposed, were socio-historical in nature (Luria, 1976). The Soviet republic of Uzbekistan in Central Asia provided Vygotsky and Luria with the perfect testing ground for these ideas. The vast majority of Uzbeks were completely illiterate (mostly villagers living in remote countryside) but enrolled in state literacy programs by the new rulers
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