Movement and mental imagery : outlines of a motor theory of the complexer mental processes / by Margaret Floy Washburn.

  • Margaret Floy Washburn
Date:
1916
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Movement and mental imagery : outlines of a motor theory of the complexer mental processes / by Margaret Floy Washburn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    able a part of his experience in general were the results of actual muscular contraction, and that there is no such thing as a remembered or centrally excited kinsesthetic sensation. One might think, he says, that in the centre for muscle feelings there is no residue left behind which can make a memory possible: that when one associates a muscle feeling in memory it always has to be produced over again: precisely our position, that kinsesthetic processes are always peripherally and never cen¬ trally excited. And his objection to this conclusion does not touch our own theory. He urges that surely traces of past mus¬ cular feelings are left behind, for there is the fact of practice: there is the fact that when in humming an air he comes to a point where he can’t remember it, he can often take his fiddle and play it (136, page 36). Evidently, we can reply to this, the fact of practice, that a movement is more readily performed each time it is repeated, has nothing to do with the power to call up a mental image of a movement without actually per¬ forming it. Indeed, the two processes of habit formation through practice and the recall of images vary inversely with each other in general: the more thoroughly a movement is practiced the less imagery of any sort accompanies it. We need not conclude, then, that because motor memory, in the sense of habit formation through lowered resistances at syn¬ apses, exists, therefore kinsesthetic image memory, which would require a fairly high degree of synaptic resistance, is necessarily possible. In Ach’s (2) experimental studies on the will, he develops a peculiar conception which he calls that of intentional movement sensations. They are one of the characteristic features, he thinks, of a voluntary act. They occur in the interval between the forming of a resolution and the execution of it, provided that there is such an interval of delay, occasioned either by opposition to the carrying out of the movement or by lack of practice in executing it. They determine the direction in which the movement is to be carried out: they can exist only weakly, as indications (andeutungsweise), without resolving themselves l