Page:Mary Whiton Calkins - Experimental Psychology at Wellesley College (The American Journal of Psychology, 1892-11-01).pdf/6

Rh Senses of the Child,” the other on “The Memory and Imagination of Children.” Both papers contain fresh material.

No topics in abnormal psychology were originally included, but several students especially interested in the subject write on “Hypnotism,” “Dreams,” “Illusions.” Most of these kept written records of their dreams, during two months. Some interesting observations were made. One dreamer was able to reproduce, in a series of drawings, certain figures of a dream; several well-marked instances of reasoning are noted; one writer makes the discovery that “my dreams are forgotten immediately upon waking, but that the instant I touch my head to the pillow the following night, the dreams of the preceding night come back with great clearness. In keeping a record, I was often obliged to wait until the following night to record something I had dreamed early in the morning.” The analogy with the hypnotic memory is very interesting.

In connection with the work of the course, a collection of statisfies about colored hearing and number-forms was undertaken. Five hundred and forty-three persons, of whom five hundred and twenty-six were members of Wellesley College, were questioned. The general results are the following: Ninety-eight are affected in one or both of these ways; thirty-two have colored hearing, and seventy-eight have forms for numbers, for months, for days (or for all); fourteen have both colored hearing and some “form.” These facts were gained by students, aided by a simple set of questions; in the cases of colored hearing, results were verified by questioning the subjects a second time after the lapse of two months; the number-form was in each case drawn by the subject; in all cases, records have been kept in uniform shape. Five essays were written on the basis of these statistics, of which each makes a special study of one or two cases of particular interest; from these essays I make occasional extracts in my brief report of our results.

Among the thirty-three cases of colored hearing are nineteen in which proper names of people suggest a color; nine instances of musical association; twelve cases in which names of days or of months are associated with color, and four of colored number-association, of which one is a colored number form. In seventeen cases letters suggest colors, usually by their sound, but sometimes by their appearance, and in three of these lists, the whole alphabet is included.

Galton’s assertion that vowels more commonly than consonants suggest colors, is not confirmed by our results; among seventeen letter-associations, there are ten in which both consonants and vowels are suggestive; four in which consonants only are associated with color; and but three in which only vowel-associations occur.

The manner of the word-coloring cannot be reduced to any general formulæ. It follows sometimes the color of the initial letter, sometimes that of a repeated letter. Sometimes, again, its color is that of the mixture of the colors of the different letters. In one case, “0 by itself is gray; when occurring with other numbers it takes the color of the accompanying number. Thus 80 is blue, the color of 8.”

Like most observers, we have found that o and i correspond respectively with white and black—and this is almost certainly