Fundamentals of child study ; a discussion of instincts and other factors in human development, with practical applications / by Edwin A. Kirkpatrick.

  • Kirkpatrick, Edwin A. (Edwin Asbury), 1862-1937.
Date:
1912 [©1907]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fundamentals of child study ; a discussion of instincts and other factors in human development, with practical applications / by Edwin A. Kirkpatrick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    Memory for isolated impressions, and in fact for nearly all things that are largely sensory, reaches its climax early in the teens. The plasticity of the brain probably decreases after puberty, and further improve- ment in memory is special, conceptional, associative, and only along lines in which one has already started ; while the tendency, and in part the ability, to acquire and retain facts in other lines after a while decreases until in old age the number of facts acquired each year is very much less than the number that are forgotten. DEVELOPMENT OF CONCEPTS The child is largely engaged in sense perception, and thus his thought processes are not far removed or eas- ily distinguished from his sense activities. The sight of its mother by a child of six months may produce some expectation of auditory, tactile, and other sensa- tions that have been previously experienced in connec- tion with seeing her. There is, however, probably no distinct or separate representation of each of these sensations ; yet other persons, as well as the mother, are distinguished from chairs, beds, and other inani- mate things, and call up a different class of images. There must therefore be the beginning of the concept of a class of objects which we know as persons with common characteristics differing from those of inani- mate things. This crude form of concept, much like that of ani- mals, may be formed without language. This must have been the case when a child, less than a year old, who was shown a bird, turned and looked at a stuffed bird in the room, and when another child, a little over