Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/552

540 in normal writing under visual guidance receive practically no attention. Ordinarily we write with the eye focussed upon the paper at or near the point of the pen while attention may be, and usually is, far away from the movement as such. In fact, consciousness of the finer aspects of the movements involved seems to be next to nothing, yet the slight peripheral visual consciousness (it cannot be called attention) is evidently of great value in furthering the co-ordinations.

In such controlled reactions as copying words under conditions involving varying degrees of difficulty there are three things we may or must attend to or be conscious of, depending upon the conditions and the difficulties involved. These are the copy, the result, and the position and movements of the bodily parts active in the production of the movements. Attention to, or consciousness of, the first two is always visual. It is moreover highly probable that in the early stages of writing the visual attention fluctuates between these two and the third. The position is, however, never normally attended to without resulting in distraction. Of these three factors the details of the result, as already shown, drop out of consciousness comparatively early. It is precisely these details which in the early stages of learning to write give the most difficulty and which are attended to most closely. It is here tentatively suggested that this principle holds for a large range of our acquired activities. This much seems clear, that consciousness of position either by means of the resident sensations or by means of the visual and remote sensations is necessary long after the details of the result have dropped out. It is highly probable that in coordinations that are far removed from our inherited reactions, like writing, consciousness of position can never drop out with impunity. The long continued practice that is necessary to reestablish walking (which at most is only partially a learned reaction) without the aid of the eye, in cases of sufficient tactual and kinæsthetic anæsthesia to destroy the sense of position, is strong presumptive evidence in favor of such a view.

Two other considerations of interest with reference to the automatization of writing movements are the behavior of inner speech and the appearance of more or less irrelevant imagery as the process becomes easier. The inner speech, more generally mentioned than any other one thing, is universally present in the copying of nonsense syllables and German words. The introspections contain only two observations of it in the upside down and mirror writing and these by the same subject. But this fact, we believe, does not justify the conclusion that these instances show that it was not generally present. It seems probable that if present, its infrequency, due to the slowness of the