MAY 2008, VOLUME 36, NUMBER 2, Abstract 3
ASSOCIATION BETWEEN SUSCEPTIBILITY TO ORIENTATION-CONTINGENT COLOUR AFTEREFFECTS, AND FANTASY PRONENESS AND DISSOCIATION
Kathryn Gow, Kim Agostinelli, and Rebecca Weiss, Queensland University of Technology
Peter Grimbeek, Griffith University
Milton Erickson was interested in a vast range of phenomena. He and his wife studied McCollough effects by inducing them in subjects via hypnosis. This article has been included to mark the depth and breadth of his (their) thinking. It describes an experiment conducted at a university where students were shown a series of coloured slides, which were alternated with vertical or horizontal gratings. While the actual colours cannot be shown on the paper copy here, we have given links to the websites where you too can test yourself on these visual phenomena. Erickson and Erickson’s (1938) findings regarding hypnotised people’s ability to see appropriate illusory colours involved hypnotising the subject first and then checking for orientation-contingent colour aftereffects (O-C CAEs). This study is different in that the subjects (students) were not hypnotised at any time during the testing session, but some of them were enrolled in an introductory hypnosis (theory) class and may have been more hypnotizable than the other students. We were interested in the relationships between the variables and the subjects’ propensity to experience these illusions.