The groundwork of psychology / by G.F. Stout.

  • George Frederick Stout
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The groundwork of psychology / by G.F. Stout. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    degree of unity which belongs to the process; (2) the near- ness or remoteness in time of the presentations which successively emerge into the focus of attention; (3) the order of the successive presentations; (4) the frequency with which the attention-process is repeated. (1) The unity of the attention-process depends on the unity of its total object. But this may vary very greatly in degree in different cases. There is a corresponding variation in the facility with which associations are formed and in their strength and persistence. In trying to learn by heart a series of senseless syllables, the total object has a low degree of unity. The syllables are connected as being all articulate sounds and as form- ing a temporal series which is to be learned for a certain purpose. But their union is far looser than that of words combined in sentences so as to convey a connected meaning, and this unity becomes still more intimate if the words are arranged in rhythmic sequences, as in poetry. Professor Ebbinghaus found that on the average he had to repeat a series of thirty-six syllables fifty-five times in order to say them over from memory without an error. He required from six to seven repetitions in the case of each stanza of Schiller’s translation of the “H^neid.” Each stanza con- tains on the average fifty-six words or groups of words with a relatively independent sense. Deducting articles, prepo- sitions, and pronouns, from thirty-six to forty independent words are left. Hence Ebbinghaus infers that his power of learning Schiller’s verse is 'eight or nine times as great as his power of learning series of senseless syllables. A comparison between the number of syllables in the stanza of poetry and in the nonsense series is not practicable. For in learning intelligible sentences the mere number of syllables seems to make virtually no difference. A sen-
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