Adaptation to form distortion of a familiar shape.

Adaptation to the shape distortion produced by an arrangement of cylindrical lenses was demonstrated. Adaptation was produced by exposing subjects to a series of photographs of faces, which appeared horizontally stretched when seen through the lens arrangement. A 16-min adaptation procedure caused a change when the width of a test face was gradually varied and the subject indicated that it looked normal. An alteration in the perceived shape of a test face and an ellipse was also demonstrated when subjects gave estimates of the height and width of these test objects. These studies provide evidence for the operation of memory representations as the veridical cue in process assimilation.