It would be interesting to note the effects following, in this respect, upon the different methods of instruction in the primary and secondary schools. If speech is so fundamentally interwoven with thought and mental growth, the method and means of language study which emphasize conversational and written expression must be most valuable. And it may be that, even in the college course of four years, valuable auxiliary training may be had from the ‘recitation’ or oral method, as opposed to the exclusively ‘lecture’ method with only written tests.
I may add also a word of practical application on the subject of the psychology of reaction times. We have in this fact of types the explanation of the contradictory results reached by different investigators in the matter of motor reactions. Some find motor reactions shorter, as I have said above; others do not.[1] The reason is, probably, that in some subjects the ‘sensory’ type is so pronounced that the attention can not be held on the muscular reaction without giving confusion and an abortive result. On the other hand, some persons are so clearly ‘motor’ in ordinary life that sensory reaction is, in like manner artificial, and its time correspondingly long. And
- ↑ As illustrating this state of things, I may refer to the brief article (just come to my hands as I send this to print) by Prof. Cattell in Philosophische Studien, VIII, (1892), p. 403. He reports variations in experimental results which do not confirm the general law that motor reactions are shorter. At the same time Prof. Cattell attempts to apply as universal the principle that attention to a voluntary motor combination tends to derange it–and so he “would expect” the motor reaction to be longer. Now, as it seems to me, this principle applies largely to such movements as have already become so ‘automatic’ as to be practically reflex, i. e., out of conscious supervision altogether. In saying, “in speech, writing, reading aloud, etc., the attention is always directed to the end in view (Ziel), never to the movement,” Prof. Cattell overlooks altogether the ‘motor’ type of reagent and goes directly in the teeth of the teaching of the pathology of speech. Stricker says the motor images are exactly and only what he pays attention to. What shall we say of Sommer’s and Pick’s citations of cases in Zeitsch. für Psychologie, vol. ii, 143 and iii, 48. As a matter of fact, I think the reactions which we perform in the laboratory (moving second rather than first finger, right rather than left hand) are so evenly voluntary throughout that the principle suggested by Prof. Cattell has little appreciable influence one way or the other; although in a person of decidedly sensory type some embarrassment might arise from it. I hope to return to this subject with some figures of my own: my note in the Medical Record (N. Y.), April 15, 1893, p. 455, may be referred to.
