"First, every girl had to sort a pack of forty-eight cards into four piles as quickly as possible. The time was measured in fifths of a second, with an ordinary stop-watch.
Test for Accuracy of Movement
"The following experiment which
referred to the accuracy of movement impulses demanded that every one try to reach with the point of a pencil three different points on the table in the rhythm of metronome beats. On each of these three places a sheet of paper was fixed with a fine cross in the middle. The pencil should hit the crossing point, and the marks on the paper indicated how far the movement had fallen short of the goal. One of these movements demanded the full extension of the arm and the other two had to be made with half-bent arm. I introduced this last test because the hitting of the right holes in the switchboard of the telephone office is of great importance.
TESTING STEADINESS OF MOTOR CONTROL—INVOLUNTARY MOVEMENT PRIVATE LABORATORY, SOCIETY OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY
"The last individual experiment was
an association test. I called six words, like 'book,' 'house,' 'rain,' and had them speak the first word which came to their minds. The time was measured in fifths of a second only, with an ordinary stop-watch, as subtler experiments, for which hundredths of a second would have to be considered, were not needed.
Results of Experiments
"In studying the results, so far as the memory experiments were concerned, we found that it would be useless to consider the figures with more than ten digits. We took the results only of those with eight, nine and ten digits. There were fifty-four possibilities of mistakes. The smallest number of actual mistakes was two, the largest twenty-nine. In the experiment on attention