The Ames Room

1938

Adelbert Ames Jr. (1880–1955)

In 1938, Adelbert Ames Jr. designed a unique room meant to illustrate the principle of transactional functionalism, which states that visual perception is a function of both the visual stimulus and the viewer’s past experiences and present assumptions about the perceptual world.

Ames had been influenced by the Harvard psychologist William James. While living in Paris, he became interested in visual optics, which became his primary focus. Through his research, he made many contributions to our understanding of both the physiology and psychology of vision.

After World War I, Ames took a position at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, where he helped develop what became the Dartmouth Eye Institute, conducted research on binocular perception, and made important discoveries about such vision problems as cyclophoria (in which the eyes rotate in opposite directions) and aniseikonia (in which an image is differentially magnified on the retina of each eye). Perhaps it was this latter condition that led him to construct objects that served to demonstrate transactional functionalism in visual perception.

The Ames room was constructed as a nonrectangular trapezoidal space, with the floor and ceiling inclined toward the horizontal and in which the facing wall is higher and farther away on one side compared to the other. When viewed through specially constructed peepholes, the room looks like a normal rectangular room; however, once objects are placed in the room, a perceptual distortion is introduced such that a person or object standing on one side of the room appears to be impossibly larger than a person or object on the other side of the room. The Ames room and other demonstrations illustrate the role of experience and expectations in how we perceive our world.

SEE ALSO Sensory Physiology (1867), Experimental Psychology (1874), The Visual Cliff (1960)

Katrin Klingenberg and Sascha Koehler, employees at the exhibition “Wanderings about the Senses” at Berlin’s Adlershof science location, demonstrate the Ames room optical illusion on August 13, 2013.