# What Perky Did Not Show -Hopkins **Abstract:** Perky's famous experiments have been taken to show that at the limit perceiving and visualizing do not differ phenomenologically. One way to block this result is to argue that the task Perky set her subjects raised the threshold for perception, so that they did not perceive the stimuli shown. I argue that even if this strategy fails, Perky's results do not prove what many think. She showed her subjects, not the objects they went on to visualise, but crude pictures of such things. What they mistook for visualizing was thus, not perceptual consciousness of stimuli, but pictorial consciousness. Once we're clear about the nature of the latter, we can see that Perky's results reveal nothing very surprising at all. In 1910 Cheves West Perky published the results of a series of experiments on imagining and its relation to other mental states. One set of experiments in particular was to become famous. Perky and her collaborators asked subjects to fixate a point on on a surface while visualizing specified objects, such as a leaf, book, banana or tomato. Unknown to the subjects, the surface was a ground glass screen onto which images of those objects were projected from behind. The result was that subjects took themselves to be imagining as requested, though what they reported imagining reflected the patterns projected. For example, in response to a projection of a vertical yellow crescent, all the subjects reported imagining a banana that, to their surprise, was upright (Perky 1910: 4