Psychological Monographs (1916) - Paperback

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. DESCRIPTION OF OUR EXPERIMENTS A. Preliminary Experiments. Our investigation began with a repetition of the work of Moore (62). Our procedure and .findings were briefly as follows. From Moore's published cuts (62, p. 118) we photographed his geometrical figures to the size specified by him; and we reproduced them in the form of rubber stamps. Using these stamps, we constructed discs similar to those which he describes. Each disc contained thirty rows of five figures each, the rows being arranged radially, and the figures being separated from one another by the space of six or seven millimeters. Each row contained one common figure, which recurred in every group, and four wholly novel ones. An apparatus was constructed which exposed for one quarter of a second each row of five figures, alternating with blank areas of similar size and shape. The instructions to the observers were identical with those of Moore: "Look for the repetition of some one figure; react by pressing a key" (which stopped the exposure apparatus) "as soon as you are certain that you have seen some figure repeated." The observer was afterwards asked to give an introspective account of the processes involved in carrying out the instructions. Our results in this preliminary study were, briefly, as follows: a. We confirmed Moore's finding that the common element becomes accentuated at the expense of the surrounding elements, b. Our results differed from those of Moore, in that our observers showed marked differences in procedure, ranging from a systematic attempt to hold in imagery some figure, selected arbitrarily or by reason of the fact that it attracted attention, on the one hand, to mere passive attention, on the other hand, the observer here delaying the reaction until a figure appeared familiar, c....