Mary Cheves West Perky (1874–1940) was an American psychologist and one of the twenty-one female students who studied under Edward B. Titchener at Cornell University.
In the same year, she performed the "Banana Experiment," which demonstrated how perception and visual imagery could be confused; a phenomenon known as the Perky Effect.
[4] Perky also studied the cooperative movement, a group of organized activities aimed at providing benefits and mutual assistance among its members.
[5] The experiments performed by Perky in Titchener's lab in 1910 are considered classics in the history of psychology and mental imagery research.
Now known as the Perky Effect, her research described the result when a subject's visual perception is altered by imagining a sequence of images.
She intentionally gave them the category without suggesting a specific type of fruit, then asked her participants to fixate a point on a screen in front of them and to visualize their imagined object at that location.