Mental fatigue : a comprehensive exposition of the nature of mental fatigue, of the methods of its measurement and of their results, with special reference to the problems of instruction / by Dr. Max Offner tr. from the German by Guy Montrose Whipple.
- Offner, Max, 1864-1932.
- Date:
- 1911
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Mental fatigue : a comprehensive exposition of the nature of mental fatigue, of the methods of its measurement and of their results, with special reference to the problems of instruction / by Dr. Max Offner tr. from the German by Guy Montrose Whipple. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.
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![eluded Sexta to Untersekunda forms [ages 8 to 18] of a Breslau Gymnasium and some classes of a higher girls' school, were then asked to write down each series as accurately as possible. Fatigue was to be indicated by the number of errors. But, in almost every case, the number of errors decreased toward the end of the school session. Here, then, the effect of fatigue was concealed by practice, by the confusion incident to writing the digits, and perhaps also by the method that Ebbinghaus chose for computing the errors. And even if this method did afford a fairly exact expression of fatigue, it would need, for the same reasons as were cited for the computation method, to be supplemented by some method that would afford contact with other phases of mental activity, since the retention of series of one and two- place numbers is quite as limited and specific a form of work as is long-continued adding and multiplying. The same thing might be said, too, of tests of memory for series of words, as employed by Ritter and Tel- jatnik, and of memory for sentences, as employed by Januschke. What has been termed the ^completion method' was invented by Ebbinghaus {Neue Methode, etc.) for the same purpose of testing fatigue. There were laid before the pupils prose texts, as nearly as pos- sible of the same difficulty, in which many of the words were omitted entirely, and in which only por- tions of others, e. g., some syllables or only the first letters, were given, and the pupils were instructed to fill out the gaps so as to make sense and with due re- gard to the number of syllables demanded. Five minutes were allowed. One text was taken f romi Net-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21211632_0061.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
