The reading of words : a study in apperception / by Walter Bowers Pillsbury.

  • Pillsbury, Walter Bowers.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The reading of words : a study in apperception / by Walter Bowers Pillsbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    are said to lie unconscious in the mind, and to receive and modify the presentation that finally enters into the ‘ system.’ This apparent identification of result and condition seems to give rise to con- fusion in terminology, and tends to obscure the mechanism of the total process. It affords us no adequate idea of the play of forces involved. A second term could easily be found for the underlying dispositions which govern the formation of the conscious ‘sys- tem ’ that would not carry with it any such doubtful implications. The remainder of the scheme of the intellectual processes is prac- tically the same as our own so far as we can learn from a cursory examination, though the details are worked out much more fully. There were a large number of misreadings of words during the experiments which could not be classified in any of the usual ways, and for which we could give no explauatiou. They must be regarded as due to events in the life of the subject that lay beyond the observation of the experimenter. It is, of course, not surprising that we were unable to trace all the forces at work, when we consider the comparatively short time that the subject was under observation, and how much of character is due to the experience in the remoter part. These cases are collected in Table XXII. They number (167) almost half of the entire number of misreadings. It may be well to compare them with the total number of experi- ments. We used 155 different words altogether, and made with these over 3,000 experiments. Xot all, of course, gave defi- nite results. Of the whole 3,000, 1,570 were either read as in- tended, or read correctly, so that they could be considered in the numerical Tables; and in 330 instances another word than that intended was substituted for the word shown. About eight per cent, of the entire number of readings, that is, were due to causes not given in the experiment itself, and to con- ditions that could not be traced by the experimenter. The reader will doubtless find words in this Table which admit of an explanation that has escaped our own notice. We have thought it best to err, if at all, on the side of conserva- tism. Summary. Our problem was to investigate the nature of certain com- pound processes which Wundt has classed under the two heads of associative and apperceptive connections. We anal- ysed experimentally the psychological processes involved in the reading of a word, an assimilation; and compared the factors which we found operative in it with those that are present in the other forms of connection. Onr experimental method consisted in the presentation of words containing misprinted letters. The factors concerned in reading fall into two great groups, subjective and objective.