Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/550

538, especially in its early stages, the eye at once suggests itself. In the experiments here described the tendency to use the motor cue as the focal element is nowhere in evidence except in the upside down and mirror writing. Muscular sensations are occasionally mentioned in the other tests but never reported as focal. Moreover, it is very likely that the introspective attitude was influential in rendering them focal in the tests in which they so appear. A comparison of the tests in which kinaesthetic sensations appear as focal brings out an interesting fact. When, e.g., in the writing with mirror guidance, interpretation of the visual process is made necessary by the conditions of the experiment while the movements themselves are in no wise changed from normal writing, the subject falls back upon the use of motor sensations as the focal elements almost in spite of his effort to the contrary. That is, the tendency to follow directly the visual cue given by the mirror and thus make the wrong movements is so strong that to write correctly requires the neglect of vision until a new co-ordination is started when the mirror cue can be used directly. This, we think, shows clearly what a predominant function vision normally assumes in our writing reactions, especially when beginning.

In the upside down writing the difficulty was to visualize the letters upside down, not the movement nor to have an anticipatory image of how the changed movement was going to feel. This primary difficulty of visualizing the letter in the reversed position was experienced by every subject, but wasmet and overcome in various ways by different subjects. Some succeeded in visualizing the letter upside down, two visualized themselves as sitting "on the other side of the desk" while one thought "of how the hand should go" and of the muscular sensations when the movement was once started. Attention is called to the fact that in the mirror writing (i.e., writing with work reflected in the mirror) what is being put on the paper is constantly flashed back to the eye in a reversed position, and that the sight of this reversed position tends immediately to reverse the movement, while in the upside-down writing the subject sees what is written as it is written. In the latter the vision controlling the movement is direct and correct; in the former it is indirect and reversed. In the upside-down writing the muscular sensations were theoretically radically changed from normal writing while the subject's vision of what he was doing was not interfered with, but in the reflected writing the muscular sensations theoretically were the same as under normal conditions and actually should be the same so far as the movement itself is concerned, while the subject's vision of what he was doing