Perversible Figures: An Ironic Process in Perception

Daniel Wegner developed an experimental paradigm and a theory of cognitive processing which explained the phenomenon of being unable to avoid thinking about something one is actively trying not to think about it. Wegner termed this the Ironic Effect. He proposed that the Ironic Process underlying this effect entails the integration of two parallel processes: an effortful cognitive process which searches for distractors, and an automatic process which monitors the occurrence of the forbidden target thought (Wegner, et al., 1987). We wondered whether the utilization of ambiguous stimuli, known to involve both automatic and voluntary, cognitive-like processes, might reveal that perceptual processes operate in a way analogous to the cognitive processes involved in thought suppression. Specifically, we considered whether, if observers were instructed to suppress one view of a reversible figure, processes within the perceptual system would be activated that are analogous to those described in Wegner's Ironic Process theory. We developed a series of experiments in which we presented subjects with a reversible figure for a period of 120,000ms. Subjects were asked to try not to see, i.e. suppress, one view of the figure. Initial studies provided evidence of some voluntary control over figure reversal and provided a baseline for further experiments. Since Wegner and colleagues had shown that the ironic effect is greater when there is an accompanying difficult cognitive task, i.e. with a cognitive load, we wondered whether this was true with the perception of reversible figures. To this end we varied the type (cognitive or perceptual) and amount of load. We hypothesized that the imposition of a load task during subjects' efforts to suppress a particular view of an ambiguous figure would result in a disruption of their efforts to suppress, and therefore in an increase in the duration of the perception of the unintended view. We failed to find a perceptual analog to the ironic effect, which suggests that the cognitive-like processes involved in the perception of ambiguous stimuli may differ significantly from those involved in thought and/or that ambiguous figures might not be the appropriate vehicle for investigating the ironic effect in perception.