where the increasing series shows increasing negative displacement.
In the series all the observers adopted the method which has been
outlined above, that of letting the click pick out the letter, or
letting the letter announce itself. One said "the letter hits the
sound." After this sorting-out of the letter, they resorted to the
system of tests and counter-tests, in succeeding trials, to correct
the first impression. One can readily understand, then, that when
they were taken off the series altogether, an entirely different
kind of adjustment had to be made. G did not succeed in making this
new adjustment very well, as is shown by his exceptionally large
range under one letter. He could not get the two impressions to come
together. In attending to either one, he could not get the other in
relation to it. There was something in the visual series which enabled
him to get the visual impression in line with the auditory, and when
this was absent the same kind of work could not be done.
St had also a peculiar method, which was directly dependent upon the
serial character of the visual stimuli and impressions. He allowed the
series of clicks and the series of visual impressions to establish
themselves as a complex rhythm. Each series was rhythmic independently.
The two got connection by means of the click appearing as an
"after-strike," as on the piano, to a member of the visual series.
The letter "flashes out" for him as that of which the click was the
"after-strike." The click was thus between two letters. But there was
no amount of before or after about it. It was a general quality of the
whole complex which was taken to mean such and such a position of click
in the series. What he thus translated into temporal judgments, were
qualitative aspects of the rhythmic experience, to which he usually
attached no temporal meaning whatever. Learning how so to translate
them into temporal terms was a definite process of training for him.
Under these circumstances, he of course had an entirely new lesson to
learn when the visual series was taken away. In fact, it might be, he
would now find no visual impression to which the click could be an
after-strike, and so he would be entirely without material to translate
into temporal terms.
Under these circumstances it is not surprising to find G and St
exceptions to the majority of the observers in this experiment. This
makes more probable the effect of the series, inferred above for the
other observers,--namely, series decreases negative displacement.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE _Position_ OF THE _Series_ OF _Visual_
IMPRESSIONS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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