Obliviscence and reminiscence / by Philip Boswood Ballard.

  • Philip Boswood Ballard
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Obliviscence and reminiscence / by Philip Boswood Ballard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/96 page 14
    less automatically performed by them and that visual imagery probably occupies a less prominent part in memorising. It is in fact fairer to test them orally. This was done in a class of girls of about nine years of age, and the percentage of improvement for a two days’ interval was 59°6. This clearly supports the hypothesis | am trying to establish, The evidence in the infant schools is not so clear. In the experiment at schools A and B the highest degree of improvement was reached by a class of seven-year-olds and the next highest by a class of four-year- olds. In school C, however, where the interval was a fortnight, the percentages of improvement for children seven, six and five years old were 22:9, 34°3, and 97-4 respectively, and the percentages of improvers 69-9, 76°6, and 96°7 respectively. There is accordingly abundant evidence to show that from the ages of five to fourteen there is generally a gradual and uninterrupted decline in the extent to which the power of recall improves with the lapse of time. The data I have been able to obtain respecting subjects over the age of fourteen are more scanty. Thirty-five subjects (boys and girls) between the ages of fourteen and fifteen improved by 5 per cent. after an interval of two days, thirty-six subjects between the ages of fifteen and sixteen improved by 8 per cent., and ten subjects from seventeen to nineteen years old deteriorated by 14 per cent. Through the courtesy of friends I found it possible to obtain from training colleges the papers of students who were tested in the same way as the elementary school children. The results are shown in Table VIII. TABLE VIII. Number of Percentage of Percentage of students Interval students improvement who improved 1 day 22 —9°9 41 2 days 13 - — 28 14:3 7 35 9 31-4 Bn: 9 — 30°8 22-2 do oas 80 —17°8 22°5 The first four groups, which consisted entirely of men, dealt either with an old version of the ballad of “The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington ” or with Matthew Arnold’s “Saint Brandan”; and the last group, which contained women only, was given Newbolt’s “ Ballad of John Nicholson.” For the two and five days’ experiments the number of subjects was so small that the results are of little statistical significance. The general trend of the curve is however unmistakable, and is quite in conformity
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3