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Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau: Anorthoscopic Discs Anamorphically distorted images) c1832
Plateau was one of the great minds of perceptual cognition in the early 19th century. It was Plateau who explored the well-known notion of persistence of vision (then recently defined by Peter Mark Roget “as the ability of the retina to retain an image of an object after its removal from the field of view”; it was Plateau who discovered the apparent motion that could be achieved by modifying a stroboscope - he called this a Phenakistoscope - ‘a deceiving image’. This predated Simon von Stampfer’s Stroboscopic experiments by a few months - the Phenakistoscope relied on the persistence of vision to make the World’s first mechanical animation device - it became a popular toy and was reiterated in various guises throughout the next 50 years - including some experiments by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1890s. Plateau continued work on the perception of motion with his anorthoscopic discs - these were based on the principle that partially seen images, given the right conditions, can apparently be fully recomposed in our brain. These I find are truly remarkable (there are several demos of Anorthoscopic discs on Youtube) - the next big breakthrough in understanding motion perception came with the modern work of gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer on the Phi Phenomenon in 1912-1916.