One More Evidence Against the Classical Conditioned Hypotheses of McCollough Effect

摘要

The goal of the experiments carried out was to find out whether the McCollough effect (MCE) is a classical example the conditioned case or it has different explanation. Ten test subjects of different age with normal color vision participated in two series of researches. We tried to find out whether the use of a conditioned stimulus (in this case - sound) will have an impact on elaboration of the McCollough type after-effect. The addition of sounds with different tone frequencies to stimuli used in classical McCollough adaptation procedure did not impact on elaboration of McColough effect. In the following experiment orientation was excluded. We tried to produce a conditioned reflex only by color and sound pairing. A red rectangle paired with 700 Hz tone as well as a green rectangle paired with 300 Hz tone were presented to the test subject. After the adaptation procedure the subjects did not perceive illusive colors on white rectangular test stimuli accompanied with sounds (300 and 700 Hz frequencies). This fact indicates that the temporary connection between auditory and vision areas was not established in such cases. We suppose that explanation of MCE as a classical conditioned reflex maybe is not true.