Experimenter naiveté and imaginal judgments.

Finke and Kurtzman report that fields of resolution increase with increases in the diameter of both perceived and imagined circular patterns. Their study apparently was conducted by an experimenter who was aware of the hypotheses under test. In contrast to these results, we find no such increase for imagined circular patterns when the experimenter is not aware of the experimental predictions, even though our subjects received imagery training as extensive as that used by Finke and Kurtzman. Our results cannot readily be attributed to differences between the experiments, other than those associated with experimenter naiveté, for we replicated Finke and Kurtzman's observations that (a) the fields of resolution in perception increase with both the diameter and the relative brightness of the patterns and (b) the fields of resolution in imagery do not increase with the relative brightness of the patterns. Our results also challenge Finke and Kurtzman's contentions that imagery and perception are treated as functionally equivalent at area-processing levels of the visual system but not at contrast-processing levels.