Seeing Things

One of my more embarrassing moments in grade school didn’t involve bad hairdos, outdated clothing, or anything that got me teased by classmates. It was my performance on the day of the standard “Eye Test” that brings a red flush to my cheeks.

When I was in third grade, they had an optician come around to administer a standard eye test to all of us. This included a test for color-blindness. I had to peer rather hard and deep into the Seurat-like pictures of colored dots to make out the 7, the 6, the 4, embedded in them. Then I came to that fateful card whose pattern appeared more obscure than the rest. I looked long and deep into the pointillist display, and finally pronounced that I discerned a number there. I think I said I saw a “3.”

The optician smiled indulgently at me and said no, actually that card had no number hidden. She cautioned me that I shouldn’t feel I had to identify a number on every card. “Just see what’s there,” her tone turned slightly monitory.

I felt ashamed of myself. I’d thought I was better than that. I didn’t think I could be so easily led into seeing things that weren’t there just because there was an assumption that such things existed. I had told myself that I would never go into a house and see ghosts just because the house had a reputation for being haunted. I felt rather condescendingly removed from all those people who see images of the Virgin Mary emerging from every water stain, just because they believe that holy presences are floating around, standing ready to manifest themselves and help guide believers through troubled times. I thought I was above being influenced by the preconceptions other people planted in every situation. Even at that young age, I had prided myself on being more independent-minded. Now here I was, seeing numbers in what was just a random spattering of parti-colored dots.

I swore - from that moment on, I would rely only on my own judgment. I wouldn’t be influenced by assumptions of what I was supposed to see and think. Yes, sure…

Skip ahead a few decades. I saw zigzag white flashes in one eye. Worried that this might be a sign of a detaching retina, I rushed in a flurry of anxiety to my regular eye care center, the only place I could get in without being referred by a primary care physician. As it turned out, this was the best possible place I could have gone. A majority of these franchise chains now have much the same kind of high-tech examining equipment that the most expensive ophthalmologist has. And you don’t need a referral. You can pretty much just drop in.

The optician, a comforting, pretty young woman, examined me with some impressive imaging equipment. What a relief when she told me that my zigzags were just normal aging, the result of pieces of the lining of the back of the eye peeling off and floating into the vitreous, the liquid of the eye. “It happens to almost everyone,” she reassured me. (Although after later taking a poll of my acquaintances and finding no one else had those kinds of floaters, I thought that perhaps the woman might have stretched the truth in order to be a little too reassuring. But I’ll settle for reassurances wherever I can get them.)

But after she had finished that more urgent exam of the inner workings of my eye, the Doctor proceeded to do a routine eye exam – which included, shades of yesteryear, a test for color-blindness. Once again, those pointillist paintings were presented to me on flash cards, one after the other.

The only excuse I can offer for what happened next is that I was still coming off the edge of my nervousness about losing my vision altogether, so I was eager to prove to myself and to the Doctor that nothing was really wrong with me. I peered deep into the heart of each one of those cards, looking for the “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” subject matter that I assumed a normally-sighted person should be able to discern in them. With the third or fourth card, I strained to see and finally, with false bravado, pronounced that it contained an embedded “7.”

In almost perfect replay of that exam I’d had decades before, the Doctor gently corrected, “No, that card actually has no figure in it. That’s OK. Just tell me what you actually see.”

I’d done it again! After all those intervening years of chiding myself for having been so easily led into making false reports, after a virtual lifetime of resolve to be true to what was actually true for me – I’d gone wrong again. At the first opportunity I’d been given to prove my stalwart honesty – I’d failed once more! It was a humbling experience.

Now I better understand how easily people can be led into making false confessions to the police, even when the police don’t use overtly intimidating methods. Just a persistent pressure of suggestion that a person is guilty can soon lead that person to assume guilt.

This whole experience recalls more specific ways in which police investigations go wrong. The danger is not only in leading suspects to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, but there’s a broader danger that lies in the way witnesses to a crime are interviewed. Procedural manuals for detectives are recognizing some of these pitfalls and are encouraging changes in the ways witnesses are presented with line-ups and mug shots. More and more care is being taken not to plant suggestions in the minds of witnesses.

One procedural recommendation I read about particularly addresses the kind of error I made during my color-blindness tests. It’s been found that making one small change in the way eye witnesses to crimes are presented with mug shots can make a large difference in the accuracy of their resulting identifications. When a witness is just silently presented with a series of pictures of likely offenders, or with a line-up - chances are high that the witness will identify some individual from among the group as having been the perpetrator she saw, and she’ll will a positive identification, an identification that later proves to be dead wrong. But if a witness is first cautioned that the person who committed the crime may or MAY NOT be among those presented to her in the mug shots or in the line-up, then the witness is much less likely to finger anyone they see in the assortment. Many fewer false arrests result.

In many other ways, police are being trained to carefully avoid planting any assumptions in the minds of witnesses or of anyone likely to testify about the way a crime went down. It’s so easy to float an assumption and to consequently skew people’s perceptions of what happened and their reports of what they saw.

So apparently I’m not alone in being easily influenced by what I think I’m supposed to see. But I’m going to be ready for them next time for sure. When, in another five or six decades, I have my color vision tested again – I’m going to be sure to be on the alert to see nothing. Of course, by then, I’ll be well over 100, and “nothing” might be literally all I can see!

                                                 


Can You See Me Now?