Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/499



Measurements of mental relationships are so important and so scanty that I venture to report certain ones in the case of memory, although they are by no means satisfactory with respect to method. They will not, however, be misleading to any one who bears in mind their limitations.

The measurements are of the relations in educate'd adults:–(1) between (a) the ability to remember a list of twelve words from a single hearing, at a rate of approximately one per second, long enough to write them immediately at the close of the reading; and (b) the same ability in the case of a list of five three-place numbers. There were five lists of (a) and five lists of (b). (2) Between: (a) and (c) the ability to remember the sixty words given in the five tests of (a) twenty-four hours later.

No requirements were made as to the order except, of course, that the order of the digits within each three-place number must be correct. The basis of the memory of (c) was not only the single hearing, and the experience of writing down such words as the individual remembered, but also the experience of scoring one's results from a complete list given to the individual for that purpose.

(1) and (2) do not, that is, measure the relationships in general, but the relationships as influenced by the restriction of the tests to one half-hour in the case of (1) and (2) and the relationship as influenced by the variations in the degree of attention given to the words in scoring results in the case of (2). Moreover, I have not corrected the results for spurious correlation due to sex, nor for attenuation due to the small number of tests.

The lists used and the method of scoring were as follows: The number of individuals was 38 for relation i and 40 for relation 2.

The lists of words used were:  near

out

false

lot

gift

end

cheat

thought

lose

add

queer

full

bell

cloud

box

slate

cap

wing

flag

bed

stone

Pig

house

nose

break

call

sleep

drop

smile

run

eat

cry

drink

hit

sing

skip

maze

cress

hob

zest

eke

slink

fob

lush

elk

bland

tweak

lilt

yet

shall

and

lest

how

could

though

when

let

your

since

more

The lists of numbers used were: 791

469

254

624

639

716

948

851

579

356