Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/539

Rh typewriting consists in the fact that after the subject had once learned the order of the letters on the keyboard and the list of words to be written he knew at each point in the series of movements just what was to be done next. Indeed, in their general nature these movements resemble complex reaction-time experiments involving discrimination and choice, rather than ordinary typewriting, differing from the former only in the fact that the stimuli were given in a uniform order.

The four subjects C, D, E and R who served for this experiment were graduate students in the department of psychology of Clark University. Each had had experience as a reagent prior to this experiment. C, D and E gave thirty sittings, each writing the list on the average nearly 500 times. Besides the brief "practice" period mentioned, R also wrote the list from ten to twenty times per day for additional practice, thus writing the entire list a total of over a thousand times during a period of seven weeks.

That these movements became practically automatic with daily practice in a few weeks' time is not surprising when the simplicity of each movement taken by itself physiologically is considered. The simplicity of the movement as compared with ordinary writing or throwing a ball, is in itself sufficient to account for the rapidity of automatization. This fact was a decided advantage since it permitted a genetic study as well as a cross-section study which was all the experiments on ordinary writing afforded.

The most striking characteristic of the first stage of control in these type writing movements is the pronounced dependence upon the eye on the part of every subject. This was true not only when writing from the list in ' 'practice' ' but also when writing to dictation for the records. In this first stage while writing to dictation the subject apperceived the word by pronouncing it in inner speech, then repeated, in inner speech, each letter while running his eyes over the "keyboard" to locate each letter of the word before the writing (*. e., pressing the bulb) was begun. In addition to fixating each letter before the word was begun, it was again attentively fixated when the corresponding bulb was pressed, making a double visual sweep of the cardboard guide which carried the letters. Not only was this true, but in case of the two subjects C and R who had had no especial practice in controlling the fingers separately, such as is afforded by typewriting or piano-playing, the attentive fixation was extended from the letters on the cardboard to the corresponding bulbs as each was pressed. The other two subjects, E and D, one a practiced piano-player, the other a typewriter, gave no indication of fixating the bulbs during this first period.