:: By Hana Yoo, '07

:: Photo courtesy Special Collections Research Center

Peer Review ::

Photographic Memory

Here a chick, there a chick…

The chick decked out in three-dimensional spectacles was one of many that Eckhard Hess, then an associate professor in Chicago’s psychology department used in a series of 1953 experiments on binocular depth perception. Hess fitted newly hatched birds with goggles, turned out the lights, and observed whether the animals could detect nearby objects. The chicks, allowed to peck freely at the objects, demonstrated an innate ability to gauge location in space. Like humans viewing a 3-D film, they also perceived three-dimensional objects as being closer than they actually were. This chicken–human vision parallel paved the way for more binocular-depth testing, using chickens as experimental subjects to shed light on human visual mechanisms.