Psychological Review

Lay, Wilfrid

doi: 10.1037/h0068260pmid: N/A

The subjects of this report are three sisters, D, C and K, aged respectively 9, 10 and 12. D sees the letters black on a background of indefinite color, but as if they were behind the patches of the color to which the letters correspond. The color is seen only when she thinks the words separately, not when she reads them or hears them spoken connectedly in a sentence. The position of the word and color is close to the eyes or in the head. C sees the words from a foot to a yard away. Sounds and smells are yellow to her except thunder, which is black; but the color is very dim and she herself is somewhat uncertain about it. To K the colors are 'far away,' but seem to come nearer when closely attended to. Her brightest words are the yellow ones. All three have had these pseudo-sensations as long as they can remember, but their peculiarity was not noticed until about a year ago. They have not influenced one another in the coloring of letters or words, as they have been observed always to disagree about the same letters in the same way. This article presents a table giving in the children's own language the colors, if any, of all the letters of the alphabet, days, months, certain proper names, certain common nouns selected for their phonetic or orthographical peculiarities and certain numbers.

Hylan, J. B.

doi: 10.1037/h0066367pmid: N/A

The facts of the oscillation of feeble impressions are still under discussion. The alternate increase and decrease of weak sensations may be of peripheral or of central origin; the peripheral sources may be nervous or muscular, the central process may go on in the cortical end apparatus of the sensory nerves or in that psycho-physical system which we call attention. It is clear that only in the last of these four cases is the fluctuation really fluctuation of the attention, the name usually given to the phenomenon. There is no doubt but that the discussion has so far been based on a rather small number of facts; it was the purpose of my investigation to secure more experimental results which might throw light on the question. I used optical, tactual and thermal stimuli. The results show that with all subjects there is a tendency to alternate between the accommodation for the nearer and the farther spot, but with most subjects this fluctuation is much slower than the oscillation of one spot alone. The second research had to do with touch and temperature. As here the same object gives at the same place both a touch sensation and a cold sensation, their fluctuation and their relations must be suggestive for the understanding of the process. The fluctuations were registered by small finger movements of the subjects and measured in fifths of a second. The individual results show great differences and irregularities, but the average of all experiments with all subjects shows a distinct tendency for the intervals without sensation to become longer as the temperature rises.

Smith, W. G.

doi: 10.1037/h0070984pmid: N/A

The extent and character of memory at different stages of repetition was studied. 8 Ss were asked to learn a series of nonsense syllables, and to recollect them after repeating them a number of times. It was found that continued repetition helped in impressing any kind of subject matter on memory.

Solomons, L. M.

doi: 10.1037/h0068948pmid: N/A

The experiments of which a provisional account is given here were the outgrowth of an effort to determine whether least perceptible differences of color saturation obeyed Weber's law, and though they have branched out into the wider field of the general relation of white and black to the colors they are still best presented from this point of view. The result of a long series of observations showed that the saturation of a mixture of color and white is entirely independent of the intensity, and of the actual quantity of color, and depends only on the ratio of the color to the white. The law is perfectly obeyed within the limits of experimental error. The equality point was always determined by the method of least observable difference, though it was not long before the judgment of the equality point became more accurate than in most judgments, being nearly always placed in the same position, for movements in both directions. The teleological significance of the law is obvious. It enables us to identify objects in varying light intensity. The characteristic of a colored object is the proportion of the colored light to the white light that it reflects. The actual quantity of colored light depends upon the intensity of the incident light. It is therefore of the greatest importance for the recognition of objects that the intensity of coloration should depend upon the ratio of colored light to white, and not upon the actual quantity of colored light.