Psychology by Robert S. Woodworth (top rated ebook readers .TXT) 📕

can see his progress, this acts as a strong incentive to rapid improvement.

Ordinarily, we have no clear indication of exactly how well we are doing, and are satisfied if we get through our job easily and without too much criticism and ridicule from people around. Consequently we reach only a moderate degree of skill, nowhere near the physiological limit, and do not acquire the methods of the real expert.

This is very true of the manual worker. Typesetters of ten or more years' experience were once selected as subjects for an experiment on the effects of alcohol, because it was assumed that they must have already reached their maximum skill. In regard to alcohol, the result was that this drug caused a falling off in speed and accuracy of work--but that is another story. What we are interested in here is the fact that, as soon as these long-practised operators found themselves under observation, and their work measured, they all began to improve and in the course of a couple of weeks {327} reached quite a new level of performance. Their former level had been reasonably satisfactory under workaday conditions, and special incentive was needed to make them approach their limit.

A similar condition of affairs has been disclosed by "motion studies" in many kinds of manual work; the movements of the operative have been photographed or closely examined by the efficiency expert, and analyzed to determine whether there are any superfluous movements that could be eliminated, and whether a different method of work would be economical of time and effort. Usually, superfluous motion has been found and considerable economy seen to be possible. There is evidently no law of learning to the effect that continued repetition of a performance necessarily makes it perfect in speed, ease, or adaptation to the task in hand. What the manual worker attains as the result of prolonged experience is a passable performance, but not at all the maximum of skill.

The brain worker has little to brag of as against the manual worker. He, too, is only moderately efficient in doing his particular job. There are brilliant exceptions--bookkeepers who add columns of figures with great speed and precision, students who know just how to put in two hours of study on a lesson with the maximum of effect, writers who always say just what they wish to say and hit the nail on the head every time--but the great majority of us are only passable. We need strong incentive, we need a clear and visible measure of success or failure, we need, if such a thing were possible, a practice curve before us to indicate where we stand at the present moment with respect to our past and our possible future.

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Habit

A habit is contrasted with a reflex, in that the reflex is native, the habit acquired; but both are alike in being prompt and automatic reactions. The best antithesis to a habit is the response of a person to a novel situation, where neither nature nor previous experience gives him a ready response. The new response is exploratory and tentative, while habit is fixed and definite. The new response is variable, the habit regular. The new response is slow and uncertain, the habit fairly quick and accurate. The new response is attended by effort and strained attention, the habit is easy and often only half-conscious. The new response is apt to be unsatisfying to the one who makes it, while habit is comfortable and a source of satisfaction.

To break a habit is most uncomfortable. Nature--at least that "second nature" which is habit--calls aloud for the customary performance. Strenuous effort is required to get out of the rut, and the slipping back into the rut which is almost sure to occur in moments of inadvertence is humiliating. Result--usually the habit sticks.

But if the habit simply must be broken? Breaking a habit is forming a counter-habit, and the more positive the counter-habit the better for us. This counter-habit must not be left to form itself, but must be practised diligently. Strong motivation is necessary, no half-hearted acquiescence in somebody else's injunction to get rid of the habit. We must adopt the counter-habit as ours, and work for a high standard of skill in it. For example, if we come to realize that we have a bad habit of grouchiness with our best friends, it is of little use merely to attempt to deaden this habit; we need to aim at being a positive addition to the company whenever we are present, and to practise the art of being good company, checking up our efforts to be sure we are hitting {329} the right vein, and persisting in our self-training till we become real artists. It takes some determination for a grouchy individual to make such a revolution in his conduct; his self-assertion resists violently, for the grouchiness is part and parcel of himself and he hates to be anything but himself. He must conceive a new and inspiring ideal of himself, and start climbing up the practice curve towards the new ideal.

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EXERCISES

1. Outline the chapter.

2. Which of the acts performed in eating breakfast are instinctive, which are matters of habit, and which are partly the one and partly the other?

3. Compare your mental attitude in approaching an unfamiliar and a familiar task.

4. How does the performance of the expert in swimming or dancing, etc., differ from the performance of the beginner? Analyze out the points of superiority.

5. Show that the element of trial and error is present in (a) the child's learning to pronounce a word, and (b) learning "how to take" a person so as to get on well with him.

6. Why is it that our handwriting, though exercised so much, is apt to grow worse rather than better, while on the contrary our spelling is apt to improve?

7. How would you rate your efficiency in study? Is it near your physiological limit, on a plateau, or in a stage of rapid improvement?

8. A practice experiment. Take several pages of uniform printed matter, and mark it off into sections of 15 lines. Take your time for marking every word in one section that contains both e and r. The two letters need not be adjacent, but must both be present somewhere In the word. Having recorded your time for this first section, do the same thing with the next section, and so on for 12 sections. What were you able to observe, introspectively, of your method of work and changes with practice. From the objective observations, construct a practice curve.

9. Write brief explanations of the following terms:

practice
habit
higher unit
overlapping
plateau
physiological limit
insight
trial and error
negative adaptation
substitute stimulus
substitute response
conditioned reflex

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REFERENCES

Thorndike's Animal Intelligence, Experimental Studies, 1911, reports his own pioneer work in this field. See also Chapter X in the same author's Educational Psychology, Briefer Course, 1914.

For other reviews of the work on animal learning, see Watson's Behavior, 1914, pp. 184-250; also Washburn's Animal Mind, 2nd edition, 1917, pp. 257-312.

For human learning and practice, see Thorndike's Educational Psychology, Briefer Course, 1914, Chapters XIV and XV; also Starch's Educational Psychology, 1919, Chapter XI.

For an experiment showing the acquisition of fears by a child, see Watson and Raynor, "Conditioned Emotional Reactions", in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1920, Vol. 3, pp. 1-14.

James's chapter on "Habit", in his Principles of Psychology, 1890, Vol. I, is a classic which every one should read.

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CHAPTER XIV

MEMORY

HOW WE MEMORIZE AND REMEMBER, AND IN WHAT RESPECTS MEMORY CAN BE MANAGED AND IMPROVED

So much depends on a good memory in all walks of life, and especially in brain work of any sort, that perhaps it is no wonder that many students and business and professional men become worried about their memories and resort to "memory training courses" in the hope of improvement. The scientific approach to this very practical problem evidently lies through a careful study of the way in which memory works, and the general problem may be expressed in the question, how we learn and remember. This large problem breaks up, on analysis, into four subordinate questions: how we commit to memory, how we retain what has been committed to memory, how we get it back when we want it, and how we know that what we now get back is really what we formerly committed to memory. In the case of a person's name which we wish to remember, how do we "fix it in mind", how do we carry it around with us when we are not thinking of it, how do we call it up when needed, and what assures us that we have called up the right name? The four problems may be named those of

(1) Memorizing, or learning,
(2) Retention
(3) Recall
(4) Recognition

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The Process of Memorizing

As memorizing is one sort of learning, what we have found in the preceding chapter regarding the learning process should throw light on our present problem. We found animals to learn by doing, and man by doing and also by observation or observation combined with doing. Observation is itself a form of doing, a mental reaction as distinguished from a purely passive or receptive state; so that learning is always active. Observation we found to be of great assistance, both by way of hastening the learning process, and by way of making what is learned more available for future use. Our previous studies of learning thus lead us to inquire whether committing to memory may not consist partly in rehearsing what we wish to learn, and partly in observing it. Learning by rote, or by merely repeating a performance over and over again, is, indeed, a fact; and observant study is also a fact.

Let us see how learning is actually done, as indicated by laboratory experiments. The psychologist experiments a great deal with the memorizing of nonsense material, because the process can be better observed here, from the beginning, than when sensible material is learned. Suppose a list of twenty one-place numbers is to be studied till it can be recited straight through. The learner may go at it simply by "doing", which means here by reading the list again and again, in the hope that it will finally stick. This pure rote learning will perhaps do the job, but it is slow and inefficient. Usually the learner goes to work in quite a different way. He observes various facts about the list. He notices what numbers occur at the beginning and end, and perhaps in other definite positions. He may group the digits into two-place or three-place numbers, and notice the characteristics of these. Any familiar combinations that {334} may occur, such as 1492, he is likely to spy and remember. Lacking these, he can at least find similar and contrasting number-groups.

For example, the list

5 7 4 0 6 2 7 3 5 1 4 0 9 2 8 6 3 8 0 1,

which at first sight seemed rather bare of anything characteristic, was analyzed in a way partly indicated by the commas and semicolons,

5, 74, 0; 62, 73; 5140; 9, 286; 380, 1,

and memorized easily. These observed facts transformed the list from a shapeless mass into something having definite characteristics, and the observed characteristics stuck in mind and held the rest together.

Lists of nonsense syllables, such as

wok pam zut bip seg ron taz vis lab mer koj yad

are apt to be learned largely by observation of similarities and contrasts, by reading meanings into the syllables, and by grouping into pairs and reading rhythmically. Grouping reduces the twelve syllables to six two-syllabled nonsense words, some of which may suggest meaningful words or at least have a swing that makes them easy to remember. Perhaps the first syllable of every pair is accented, and a pause introduced after each pair; such devices assist memorizing.

The rhythmical and other groups that are found or made by the learner in memorizing nonsense lists are, in effect, "higher units", and have much the same value