Mroczko-Wąsowicz goes on to, quite reasonably, point to some of the shortcomings of our pilot study. In fact, we pointed out many of these same shortcomings ourselves. There are a couple however that are worth saying at least a bit about.
Mroczko-Wąsowicz points out that some of our findings are based on subjective report, and that there are “doubts about whether subjective reports are trustworthy.” While in general this is entirely correct, there is a sense of phenomenal adaptation according to which what we were studying is precisely how things would seem to the subject. It is undoubtedly the case that even in such situations one is not limited to what subjective report might have to say on the matter. Indeed, this is among the reasons we included other experiments as part of the protocol. But the phenomenon that I subjectively notice and can report on when I adapt to the spatial distortion of new corrective glasses, or to the color distortion of blue-blocking sunglasses is an interesting one, and one might reasonably wonder if one can get an analogous adaptation effect – the same subjectively noticeable and reportable effect – with respect to rotated colors.
This is related to a second point. Mroczko-Wąsowicz echoes our claim that it is a shortcoming of the study that the researchers themselves were subjects. Surely it is the case that knowledge of the experiment and the phenomena to be studied can bias the results. Of course I agree completely with that.
Nevertheless, I am reminded of a point made in conversation by Vilayanur Ramachandran. In a moment of venting about some objections made to some of his results, he hypothesized that he could show psychologists a talking pig and they would scoff that it was an n of 1.
In the present case, it is true that having the experimenters themselves be subjects effects the results. But even so, if it turned out that I or the other subject JK did end up in a state that seemed to us to be one of phenomenal adaptation, then this would still be interesting, because if nothing else it would demonstrate that we could get the effect in anyone if we just briefed them on the experiment beforehand. If I hypothesize that hitting myself on the head three times with a baguette will make me able to speak fluent French, and I do the experiment and it does, this is an interesting result even if I was both experimenter and subject.
In any case, Mroczko-Wąsowicz and I are in a great deal of agreement about the limitations created by the methodology of our pilot study, and these limitations need to be kept firmly in mind when anyone ventures to interpret our findings or follow up on them.