The Life and Unusual Ideas of Adelbert Ames, Jr

This paper is a summary of the life and major achievements of Adelbert Ames, Jr., an American ophthalmologist and perceptual psychologist, who had initially wanted to be a visual artist. He is most widely remembered today as the inventor of the Ames Demonstrations in Perception, the most famous of which consists of a distorted room in which people seem to shrink as they walk from one corner to another. This essay discusses the relationship of the Ames Demonstrations to anamorphic visual art, and it documents various comments by perceptual psychologists and artists who were directly acquainted with Ames. Fig. 1. In the Overlay Demonstration (this is a reconstruction ofonly one part of the original version), Ames removed acorner section of a playing card so that the card more distant from the viewer (the eight of hearts) appears to be less distant.