Abstract Summary
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a methodological controversy emerged around the scientific problem of understanding human color vision in evolutionary terms. While the first experimental psychology laboratories were being constructed across Western Europe and North America to subtend a natural science of mind, zoologists and ethnologists were simultaneously researching color vision among populations outside Europe. In the early-twentieth century, the “colour-sense controversy” crystalized among experimentalists seeking an understanding of human color vision in ontogenetic and phylogenetic terms. To build a natural science of mind capable of accounting for visual perception and attendant forms of cognition, these experimentalists moved between psychological laboratories, anthropological expeditions and field sites, and experimental apparatus which some built in their own homes and gardens. This paper shows that an overlooked product of the colour-sense controversy was the methodological specification of “looking-time” (a combination of direction and duration of optic fixation) as a scientific measure of perception and cognition. At the turn of the century, these experimentalists argued that measures of looking-time provided access to the nonverbal minds of human infants, while also authorizing research among linguistically-diverse peoples. While looking-time is often thought to have been operationalized during the 1950s, attention to the material stuff of psychological experimentation around the turn of the twentieth century reveals a sustained methodological controversy surrounding the utility of looking-time as an experimental measure in research concerned with color vision. Finally, attending to the material cultures of human sciences circa 1900 calls into question neat divisions between laboratory and field sciences.
