Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/543

Rh Another fact to be observed here is that, as this "short-circuiting" process takes place, control as a whole shifts from what at first was almost, if not wholly, peripheral, involving a hunting about with effort, to what may be called a central control, securing precision and ease in the sense that the operator knows just what to look for and what to do, and in the further sense that the association links between the factors involved in control function without mental effort. In figurative language the subject has at his command a panoramic map of the whole mental situation and the transition from one focal point to the next on this map tends to become automatic. As the "shortcircuiting" and knitting-up process takes place, the tendency is clearly present to pass from what was first a disjointed mass of details to what becomes a complex unity. Gradually organization comes out of chaos; and, with organization, details as such lose their distinctness and merge into a situation which in course of time requires attention not to separate details or series of sensations and images, but only to a total situation. But the situation does not become an attended-to situation until the "short-circuiting" process has reached a certain degree of completeness. Reduction of sensory and perceptual data to a minimum is therefore necessary to bring about a movement-situation in which the details run off without attention to them as such.

The possibility of consciously organizing a given group of movements into a control situation requiring only a single "set" of attention is therefore determined by the nature of the movements on the one hand and the span of attention on the other. Just as some of our movements surpass the physiological limit of becoming reflex–at least in a single life-time–just so other of our movements surpass the conscious limit of becoming controlled by a single "set" of attention. This "set" of attention, i.e., attention to the organized situation, is the third and last stage reached in the movements under discussion. A fuller description of this "set" as it appeared in the experience of the four subjects participating in this experiment is now in order.

It is scarcely necessary to call attention to the fact that this so-called "set" of consciousness is not a purely mental state but clearly a psycho-physical condition involving the whole musculature as well as the neural and conscious aspects of the organism. It is a movement-consciousness with habituated motor tendencies. But while the motor processes accompanying and flowing from the "set" become habitual and ultimately highly automatic, and while the distinguishable contents of the "set" are also highly involuntary, the maintenance of the "set" itself is the remaining voluntary aspect of the whole process. The introspections of both E and R, with whom the "set" was most