Most of us take for granted that the ceiling is directly above us, that thefloor is flat below, and that walls are solidly upright. But fighter pilots can't take perspective for granted, so researchers during World War built tilting chairs. The tilting room pictured here was created by Herman Witkin, Ph.D., in 1939, to increase our understanding of how people orient themselves.
Those who used visual cues (what the room looked like) to determine their orientation were called "field-dependent," and those who used postural cues (which way they felt upright) were called "field independent."
At first, field dependent learners were considered less cognitively proficient by other researchers. But after years of cognitive experiments, Witkin came to. believe that one's level of field dependency is related to a variety of early cultural and social experiences.
What started as a project to understand how pilots react to a topsy-turvy world soon turned into years of research on the complex, ways in which people learn about the world around them.
