A review of research work relating perceptual response to physical form parameters. The parameters are classified into transitive, transpositional, and intransitive. The number of intransitive parameters, which comprise measures that specify the characteristics of shape contours proper and contain the bulk of all physical measures, is quite large, but only very recent work has begun to point to the existence of a common denominator of these measures and to the possibility of arriving at a limited set of related and homogeneous parameters based on both empirical evidence and a piori mathematical considerations.

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The age at which a psychologist publishes his one most significant work may be modeled by the harmonic mean. The harmonic mean of a psychologist's age at the first and the last publication predicts that age very well. The two figures correlated .52 for a sample of 213 eminent contributors from psychology's history. The harmonic mean is not related to degree of eminence, however. Neither is it a function of sex, nationality, variations in normal life span, or the historic period of the individual's activity. Certain deviations from "normalcy" in an academic or research career make it inherently impossible to use the harmonic mean as a predictor. When these deviations are discounted, the harmonic mean accounts for almost 75% of the variance in the actual age of peak achievement.

2 experiments were performed to evaluate the usefulness of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th moments of distribution of the area and of the perimeter of random shapes as predictors of performance in a discrimination task. Repeated measures of RT were taken on 44 Ss who responded to 80 6-choice oddity-type problems denned by the presence or absence of a difference in the 3 moments. Both moments of area and of the perimeter proved to be significant (p < .01) predictors of performance. Computer method for the computation of moments is presented, and the difference between the 2 types of moments, methodological problems, their solution, and the advantages of moments as compared to other form measures are discussed.