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THEORETICAL CONTEXT AND PROBLEM MODEL of cortical integration must deal with the problem of transmission of excitation through the neural and surrounding media With respect to one of these problems-^the resistance to or ease of transmission-one of two general assumptions can be made We can assume that rate of transmission of excitation patterns is a constant for all individuals of any one species and is hcanogeneous over the entire cortical area In this case, transmission of excitation, being a constant, cannot be appealed to for an understanding of mteror intra-mdividual differences in cortical integration Alternatively, we can assume that transmission-rate of excitation pattems vanes from individual to individual, from time to tune within the same individual, and from area to area within a single osrtical field at any time With this assumption it is possible to appeal to different tial cortical conductivity as a parameter which will help us understand inter-and lntra-mdividual differences in cortical integration and therefore in behavior * Reviewed m the Veterans Admimstratuxi and publislMd widi die approval of the Chief Medical Director The statements and concimions ph^ied by the authors are a result of their own study and do not necessarily r^ect the c>l»nion and pohcy of the Veterans Adnumstration.We are indebted to the staffs of Cushmg V A Hospital for generous assistance throughout, particularly to Dr Fred A Quadfassel, Chief, Neunrfog^cal Service, for his clinical ratings of the brain-injured subjects and for his tni^ong available to us case materials and the facthties of his Service, to Dr Henry Faxtrn, Onef, Surgical Service, for his co-operatun m recruiting cortrol subjects, axA to Dr Frederick A. Wyatt, Chief, Psycholc^cal Service, for gaierous aid m facdttating die entire studyThe study was conducted while we were oa visiting s^MNxntmei^ tn the Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, m 19S0-19S1. We wish to express our appreciation to Dr William O Jenkins and Professor Frecterick Hosteller of the Department for their valuable steitistical advin a^ to the Laboratory of Social Relations for the use of its laboratory and shop fadUtks.

He was Senior Psychologist at the Perception Laboratory of the Menninger Foundation. A graduate of Columbia University in 1942 with the Ph.D., and a diplomate in clinical psychology, Dr. Klein is a national leader in the field of perception, and an authority on the function of perception in personality. He is author of many scientific journal articles, and coeditor of the book, Theoretical Models and Personality Theory. He has also contributed an important chapter to Blake and Ramsey's Perception: An Approach to Personality.Stating that the many concentrated man-hours of study which the issue of motivated perception has inspired were generated by clinicians, personality theorists and social psychologists, Dr. Klein gives a terse developmental history of the perception-motivation approach to personality. He points out that perceptual theories, which had been protected by a tradition of psychophysical methodology, were, to a great extent, first attacked by the work of Murphy, Goldstein and Allport. The attack was further inspired by psychoanalytic principles, by the clinical diagnostic work with tests by Rapaport and Schafer, and by the work of Bartlett and Sherif in the area of social psychology.Klein believes that there has been too much emphasis of relatively simple, perceptual problems at the expense of the more complex, cognitive processes. These latter, of course, involve not only the perceptual processes, but numerous motivational factors as well. From this point of view, Klein has reviewed and analyzed much of the salient work in the field of perception; he has organized and refined many of these concepts and has integrated them with his own thinking to provide an interesting and stimulating approach to understanding personality. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Robert R. Holt and Dr. David Rapaport for their many stimulating and invaluable comments on this paper.

MPLOYING a technique of exposing subliminal forms followed immediately by supraliminal forms, two early experiments have suggested that subliminal forms measurably affect conscious perception. Smith and Henriksson (1955) have reported that when a fan-shaped array of lines was shown subliminally and followed by a clearly perceptible square, the square becomes more trapezoidal, a change consistent with the usual illusion that appears when a square is seen against a fanshaped background. Klein, Spence, Holt, and Gourevitch (1958) found that different sexual and symbolic figures exposed subliminally provoked different impressions of consciously perceived pictures of people. For example, drawings of ambiguous human figures seemed more masculine when they followed a subliminal male symbol than when they followed a female symbol in another session. However, it was not certain that the meaning of the subliminal figures was solely responsible for these effects since the symbols differed markedly also in shape. Another experiment seemed necessary to test the decisive importance of meaning alone as a subliminal influence upon conscious thought, using stimuli that differed minimally in contour and maximally in meaning.Words possessing a core of self-consistent, commonly accepted social meanings, but unequivocally different from each other (e.g., ANGRY and HAPPY) meet this requirement. Through the use of words similar in size and printed in capitals, it is possible to present widely different meanings with relatively minimal variation in contour, and to test for the 1 This study was carried out under a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Patients of Manhattan VA Hospital served as 5s and we are grateful to -Bernard .Locke, Chief Psychologist, Manhattan VA Hospital, for generously helping to make available the hospital's facilities.