In the first place, the child is peculiarly susceptible to the appeals
of change, novelty, chance, or happy suggestion; and often the failure
to respond to a stimulus is due to distraction or to discomfort rather
than to lack of intrinsic interest. Again, fatigue is a matter of
considerable importance. In respect to fatigue, I should say that the
first signs of restlessness, or arbitrary loss of interest, in a
series of stimulations, is sufficient warning, and all attempts at
further experimenting should cease. Often the child is in a state of
indisposition, of trifling nervous irritability, etc.; this should be
detected beforehand, and then nothing should be undertaken. No series
longer than three trials should be attempted without changing the
child's position, resting its attention with a song, or a game, etc.,
and thus leading it fresh to its task again. Furthermore, no single
stimulus, as a colour, should be twice repeated without a change to
some other, since the child's eagerness or alertness is somewhat
satisfied by the first effort, and a new thing is necessary to bring
him out to full exercise again. After each effort or two the child
should be given the object reached for to hold or play with for a
moment; otherwise he grows to apprehend that the whole affair is a
case of "Tantalus." In all these matters very much depends upon the
knowledge and care of the experimenter, and his ability to keep the
child in a normal condition of pleasurable muscular exercise
throughout.
In performing colour experiments, several requirements would appear to
be necessary for exact results. Should not the colours chosen be equal
in purity, intensity, lustre, illumination, etc.? In reference to
these differences, I think only that degree of care need be exercised
which good comparative judgment provides. Colours of about equal
objective intensity, of no gloss, of relatively evident spectral
purity, under constant illumination--this is all that is required. The
variations due to the grosser factors I have mentioned--such as
condition of attention, physical unrest, disturbing noises, sights,
etc.--are of greater influence than any of these more recondite
variations in the stimulus. Intensity and lustre, however, are
certainly important. It is possible, by carefully choosing a room of
pretty constant daylight illumination, and setting the experiments at
the same hour each day, to secure a regular degree of brightness if
the colours themselves are equally bright; and lustre may be ruled out
by using coloured wools or blotting-papers. The papers used in the
experiments given above were coloured blotting-papers. The omission of
yellow is due to the absence, in the neighbourhood, of a satisfactory
yellow paper.
The method now described may be further illustrated by the following
experiments on the use of the hands by the young child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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