V
While I have not been altogether successful in determining by this method the relative efficiency of different sense-impressions in holding the attention, the successful results are especially interesting. In Fig. 23 the tracing marked I. shows the movement of the hand during the thirty-five seconds that the subject was counting the strokes of a metronome; tracing II. shows the movement while counting for twenty-five seconds the oscillations of a pendulum. The latter movement is in this case much more extensive than the former, thus indicating that the visual impression held the attention much better than the auditory. The subject of this record is a well-known writer and novelist; and his description of his own mental processes entirely accords with this result; he is a good visualizer, and visual impressions and memory-images dominate his mental habits.
Fig. 23.—I. Counting the strokes of a metronome. Automatograph record. Time of record, 35 seconds. Direction of the attention →. Subject facing →. II. Counting pendulum oscillations. Automatograph record. Time of record, 25 seconds. Direction of the attention →. Subject facing →.
Fig. 24.—From A to A´, reading colors; from A´ on, counting pendulum oscillations. Automatograph record. Time of record, from A to A´, 35 seconds; from A´ on, 25 seconds. Direction of the attention→. Subject facing →.
We may next turn to Fig. 24. The subject was asked to call the names of a series of small patches of color hanging upon the wall in front of him. He did this with some uncertainty for thirty-five seconds, and during this time his hand on the automatograph moved from A to A´. At the latter point he was asked to count the oscillations of a pendulum; this entirely changed the movement, the hand at once moving rapidly toward the pendulum. The pendulum was a more attractive sense-impression than the colors. The special point of interest in this record is, that upon examination the subject's color-vision proved to be defective, and thus accounted for the failure of the colors to hold his attention.
Fig. 25.—Counting pendulum oscillations. Time of record, 35 seconds. The record from B to C is continuous with that of A to B. Direction of the attention →. Subject facing →. The subject, a child of eleven years. Record reduced to ⅘ of original size.
An important problem relates to the possible correlation of types of involuntary movements with age, sex, temperament, disease, and the like. A few observations upon children are interesting in this respect. They reveal the limited control that children have over their muscles, and their difficulty to fix the attention when and where desired. Their involuntary movements are large, with great fluctuations, and irregularly towards the object of attention. Fig. 25 illustrates some of these points; in thirty-five seconds the child's hand moved by large steps seven inches toward the pendulum, and the entire appearance of the outline is different from those obtained upon adults.
Fig. 26.—Thinking of letter O. Pencil held in hand; record on table. I., subject standing; II., subject seated.
Much attention has recently been paid to automatic writing, or the unconscious indication of the nature, not merely the direction of one's thoughts, while the attention is elsewhere engaged. I attempted this upon the automatograph by asking the subject to view or think of some letter or geometric figure, and then searching the record for some trace of the letter or figure; but always with a negative result. While unsuccessful in this sense, the records prove of value in furnishing a salient contrast to the experiments in which the attention was fixed in a definite direction. For example, the subject is thinking of the letter O; he does not think of it as in any special place, and the record (Fig. 26) likewise reveals no movement in any one direction. Two records are shown quite similar in significance, and illustrating as well the difference between the movements while standing and while sitting.