Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for educationHollingworth, Leta Stetter
Science
Special talents and defects : $b Their significance for education
Hollingworth, Leta Stetter
Educational psychology; Educational tests and measurements; Exceptional children
Here, too, it should be noted that Hart and Spearman mixed a variety of
psychoses (even including an imbecile not deteriorated so far as known),
both those that do involve actual decay of ability, and those that
involve only disturbances of general auxiliary functions, like attitude
and effort. Just what would be the effect of this mixing upon the
correlations could be told only if we knew how each form of disorder
characteristically affects the relationship among mental functions,
which is unknown. If mental functions are differently selected for
impairment in the different forms of psychosis, then we should expect
diminished coefficients of correlation among the insane, because mixing
the psychoses would produce inconsistency of rank within the group. If,
however, certain functions were deteriorated in all or nearly all of the
insane, others remaining intact, or relatively so, this selective
enfeeblement would not appear in correlation coefficients. Facts like
those observed by Binet and Simon might be obscured by the methods of
Hart and Spearman.
Moore, working subsequent to Hart and Spearman, limited his
investigation to those cases believed by psychiatrists to be
characterized by real loss of abilities, the dementias: dementia
paralytica, senile dementia, and alcoholic dementia. He tested thirty
dements, laborers and tradesmen, and, as controls, six young men from
the same occupational group, in the following mental functions: (1)
perceiving eight each (in a series) of real objects, pictures of
objects, printed words, and spoken words, referring to real objects of
ordinary everyday experience; (2) repeating after one exposure of the
series as much of it as could be remembered without regard to sequence;
(3) after a minute of mental work at calculation, repeating again what
could then be remembered of the series. Moore then correlated
performance within the group in each of these functions with that in
each of the others. The coefficients thus resulting are interpreted as
follows: “The average of all correlations of perception with the various
memories is .538.... That the average correlation for memory and
perception is as high as .538 shows that there must be a common factor
present. But its presence does not exclude the existence of special
forms of mental ability.” Moore also correlated perceiving with
remembering in the functions separately, and remembering immediately
with remembering after a minute of distraction. These coefficients are
positive, and mostly high, but not perfect.
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