Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Experimental Psychology at Wellesley College (The American Journal of Psychology, 1892-11-01).pdf/3

466 object of consciousness persists in consciousness, and “persistent association,” in which all or part of it persists. Dr. James’s quantitative distinctions, corresponding with the terms “total,” “partial” and “focalized,” were also made. Students were referred to Hobbes, to Hartley, to Bain and to Dr. James, and were required to illustrate, by original examples or by quotation, the different sorts of association. This work proved very interesting and was valuable in co-ordinating psychological with literary study. The experimental work accompanying this study illustrated the value of association in shortening intellectual processes, and consisted simply in comparing the slower reading of one hundred unconnected monosyllables with the reading of one hundred connected words. Reading of passages of one hundred words in different languages was also carefully timed and compared.

A more extended experiment in association was later carried out. Each student wrote a list of thirty words, so associated that each suggested the next. The starting point was the word “book,” suggested in writing, but not read until the time of the experiment. Each list was studied by its writer, who marked with a V the names of objects or events which were visualized; indicated with a C those connected with childhood life; classified the association, as persistent or as persistent (of quality or of object); and indicated, in each case, the so-called secondary law of the association (recency, frequency or vividness). Of course each list was written when the subject was alone and undisturbed.

The fifty papers thus prepared were carefully studied by one student as the foundation of her final essay. She compared with them similar ones obtained from two classes of school children of varying ages, and from a few people in middle life. Her results are interesting. One-half the objects or scenes (in the college lists, which were the only ones indicating this fact) were visualized. Only one-fifteenth related to childhood—suggesting that the predominance of Mr. Galton’s childhood associations is not universal. The lack of them may be due to the youth of the experimenters. A comparison of the lists shows that in the children’s lists, recency is the most frequent explanation of suggestiveness, while in the college lists the vividness of the earlier object of consciousness is of greatest importance. The result tallies with the fact that “children’s interests are more of yesterday and today.”

The subject of attention was discussed on the basis of Dr.&Nbsp;James’s admirable chapter. The experimental work was in divided attention, the performance and accurate timing of two intellectual processes, first separately and then in combination.

A brief study of consciousness in its “identifying” and “discriminating” aspects was followed by a six-weeks’ study of space-perception. Lectures were offered on the three chief theories, the Empiricist, the Nativist-Kantian and the Nativist-Sensational. The required reading included references to Berkeley, to Mill, to Spencer, to D. A. Spalding (MacMillan, February, 1873), to Preyer (Appendix C of Vol. II., The Mind of The Child), to James (parts of the Space-Chapter), to Kant (Æsthetic, “Metaphysical Deduction”).

The experiments, of which there were more than thirty, illustrated the methods of gaining, or at least of developing, the space-consciousness. The theories of single vision were carefully studied and were illustrated by diagrams and by “Cyclopean eye”