Fig. 10.—Counting pendulum oscillations. Time of record, 120 seconds. Direction of the attention →. Subject facing →. Illustrates slow and indirect movement. The points, 1, 2, 3, 4, indicate the position of the writing-point, 30, 60, 90, and 120 seconds after the record was started.
Fig. 11.—Counting the strokes of a metronome. Time of record, 70 seconds. The points, 1, 2, 3, 4, indicate the positions of the writing point at 15, 30, 45, and 60 seconds after the record was begun. Direction of the attention →. Subject facing →. Illustrates slight hesitation at first and then a rapid movement toward the object of attention. Reduced to ¾ size.
Fig. 12.—Counting the strokes of a metronome. Time of record, 90 seconds. Direction of attention →. Subject facing →. Illustrates initial directness of movement followed by hesitancy.
Before passing to a more specific interpretation of the data, it may be interesting to illustrate more fully the scope of individual variations; for the great difference in availability of subjects to the muscle-reader is equally prominent in tests with the automatograph. Some movements are direct and extensive, others are circuitous and brief. Fig. 10 is a good type of a small movement, but of one quite constantly toward the object of the attention. This may be contrasted with an extreme record, not here reproduced, in which there is a movement of six and a half inches in forty-five seconds; or with a fairly extensive movement as in Fig. 11. In some cases the first impulse carries the hand toward the object of thought, and is followed by considerable hesitation and uncertainty; a marked example of this tendency may be seen in Fig. 12. There is, too, an opposite type, in which the initial movements are variable, and the significant movement toward the object of thought comes later, when perhaps there is some fatigue. This tendency appears somewhat in Figs. 11 and 13.
Fig. 13.—Thinking of a locality. Time of record, 120 seconds. Direction of the attention ←. Subject facing ←. Illustrates initial hesitancy followed by a steady movement toward the object thought of.