Mental Development in the Child and the Race
Chapter 2: A New Method of Child Study
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§ 1 Critical
THE current discussions of the more elementary mental processes show that we lack clearness in our conceptions of the earlier stages of mental life. This is evident enough to call out frequent appeals for 'scientific' child study. The word 'scientific' is all right, as far as it goes; but as soon as we come to ask what constitutes scientific child study, and why it is that we have so little of it, we find no clear answer; and we go on as before, accepting the same anecdotes of fond mothers and repeating the observations of Egger and Max Müller.[1]
Now there are only two ways of studying a child, as of studying any other object -- observation and experiment. But who can observe, and who can experiment? Who can look through a telescope and 'observe' a new satellite ? Only a skillful astronomer. Who can hear a patient's hesitating speech and 'observe' aphasia? Only a neurologist. Observation means the acutest exercise of the discriminating faculty of the scientific specialist. And yet many of the observations which we have in this field were made by the average mother, who knows less about the human body than she does about the moon or a wild flower, or by the average
(35) father, who sees his child for an hour a day, when the boy is dressed up, and who has never slept in the same room with him in his life; by people who have never heard the distinction between reflex and voluntary action, or that between nervous adaptation and conscious selection. Only the psychologist can 'observe ' the child, and he must be so saturated with his information and his observations that the conduct of the child becomes instinct with meaning for the theories of mind and body.
It is evident, however, that all faithful recording is of importance, and that this may be done by all those who can be thoroughly objective and unprejudiced in the presence of children. I believe that many parents can do this with very great accuracy; but there remains still the uncertainty, when such records are taken up for interpretation, as to whether the parent or nurse, in a particular case, has been free from the influences of affection, pride, jealousy, etc. On the whole, judging from the records in this branch of psychology, the science would better wait till its competent workers realize ,'their opportunities and seriously study the children for themselves.
And as for 'experiment,' greater still is the need. Many a thing a child is said to do, a little judicious experimenting -- a little arrangement of the essential requirements of the act in question -- shows it is altogether incapable of doing. But to do this we must have our theories, and have our critical moulds arranged beforehand. That most vicious and Philistine attempt in some quarters to put science in the straitjacket of barren observation, to draw the life-blood of all science -- speculative advance into the meaning of things -- this ultra-positivistic cry has come here as everywhere else, and put a ban upon theory. On the contrary, give us theories, theories, always theories I Let every man who has a theory
(36) pronounce his theory ! This is just the difference between the average mother and the good psychologist -- she has no theories, he has; he has no interests, she has. She may bung up a family of a dozen and not be able to make a single trustworthy observation; he may be able, from one sound of one yearling, to confirm theories of the neurologist and educator, which are momentous for the future training and welfare of the child.
In the matter of experimenting with children, therefore, our theories must guide our work -- guide it into channels which are safe for the growth of the child, stimulating to his powers, definite and enlightening in the outcome. All this was largely lacking, until recently, both in 'child psychology' and in applied pedagogy. The implications of physiological and mental are so close in infancy, the mere animal can do so much to ape reason, and the rational is so helpless under the leading of instinct, impulse, and external necessity, that the task is excessively difficult -- to say nothing of the extreme delicacy and tenderness of the budding tendrils of the mind. Experiment ? Every time we send a child out of the home to the school, we subject him to experiment of the most serious and alarming kind. He goes to a teacher who may perchance be not only not wise unto the child's salvation, but on the contrary a machine for administering a single experiment to an infinite variety of children. It is highly probable that two in every three children are more or less damaged or hindered in their 'mental and moral development in the school; but I am not at all sure that they would fare any better if they stayed at home ! The children are experimented with so much and so unwisely, in any case, that it is possible that a little intentional experiment, guided by real insight and psychological information, would do them good.
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With this preamble, I wish to call attention to a possible method of experimenting with
children.[2] In endeavoring to bring questions like the degree of memory, recognition,
association, etc., present in an infant, to a practical test, considerable embarrassment
has always been experienced in construing the child's responses safely. Of course the only
way a child's mind can be studied is through its expression -- facial, lingual, vocal,
muscular; and the first question, i.e. What did the infant do? must be followed by a
second, i.e. What did his doing that mean ? And the second question is, as I have said,
the harder question, and the one which requires more knowledge and insight. It is evident,
on the surface, that the farther away we get in the child's life from simple inherited or
reflex responses, the more complicated do the responsive processes become, and the greater
becomes the difficulty of analyzing them, and arriving at a true picture of the real
mental condition which lies back of them.
To illustrate this confusion, I may cite about the one problem which psychologists have attempted to solve by experiments on children: the determination of the order of rise of the child's perceptions of the different qualities of colour. Preyer starts by showing a child, among other methods, various colours and requiring the child to name them, the results being expressed in percentages of true answers to the whole number. Now this experiment involves no less than four different questions, and the results give absolutely no clue to their analysis. It involves: I. The child's distinguishing of different colours simultaneously displayed before it, i.e. the complete development of the child's colour sensation apparatus; 2. The child's ability to recog-
(38)-nize or identify a colour after having seen it once; 3. An association between the child's colour-seeing and word hearing and speaking memories, by which the name is brought up; 4. Equally ready facility in the pronunciation of the various colour names which the child recognizes: and there is the further embarrassment, that any such process which involves association, is as varied as the lives of children. The single fact that speech is acquired long after objects and some colours are distinguished, shows that such results are worthless as far as the problem of colour perception is concerned.
That the fourth element pointed out above is a real source of confusion is shown by the fact that children recognize many words which they cannot pronounce readily. This represents the second phase in the development of this experimental problem. Another method used by Preyer and Binet avoids this difficulty. The experimenter varied the conditions by naming a colour and then requiring the child to pick out the corresponding colour. This gave results different from those of the first method. For example, Preyer's child identified yellow better than any other colour, a result which no one has confirmed; it is negatived by the results of Garbini (Arch. per l'Anthrop. e l'Etnol., XXIV., 1894, Nos. 1, 2).
The further objection that colours might be distinguished before the word-association is established at all, or that colour-words might be interchanged or confused by the child,[3] is also seen by Binet,[4] and his attempt to eliminate that source of error constitutes what we may call the third stage in the
(39) statement of the problem. He adopts the mCthode de reconnaissance as preferable to the mCthode d'appellation. This consisted, in his experiments, in showing to a child a coloured counter, and then asking the child to pick out the same colour from a number of different coloured counters.
This reduces the question to the second of the four I have named above. It is the usual method of testing for colour blindness. It answers very well for colour-blindness; for what we really want to learn in the case of a sailor or a signalman is whether he can recognize a determined colour when it is repeated; that is, does he know green or red to be the same as his former experience of green or red ? But it is evident that there is still a more fundamental question in the matter -- the real question of colour perception. It is quite possible a child might not recognize an isolated colour quality when he could really very well distinguish colour qualities side by side. It is the question just now coming to the front, the question of absolute vs. relative recognition, or immediate vs. mediate recognition.[5] The last question is this: When does the child get the different colour sensations (not recognitions), and in what order?
A further point of criticism of Binet's results serves to illustrate my argument. Binet rules out the influence of the word memories which embarrassed Preyer's results, by his méthode de reconnaissance. The child recognizes again the colour just seen. Now those who have followed the course of recent discussions of recognition will remember that the mediation of word-associations is not ruled out in these cases in children of three to five years old or even younger. Lehmann finds coloured wools are recognized when the colours are those whose names are known (Benennungsassociation),
(40) and that shades which have not peculiar names, or whose names are not known, are not recognized. Others have held that an unobserved or unintelligible element -- a Nebenvorstellung -- may serve as the link of recognition without rising again to clear consciousness a second time. It is, of course, useless, if these results be trustworthy, to attempt to get recognitions clear of word memories after colour names have once been learned by the child. It would seem that the question ought to be taken up with younger children. Binet's experiments were in the interval between the child's thirty-second and fortieth months. It is perhaps a confirmation of Lehmann's position, that the colours least recognized in Binet's list are shades whose names are less familiar to children; his list, in order of certainty of recognition, is red, blue, green, rose, maroon, violet, and yellow, by the méthode d'appellation; and, by both methods together, red, blue, orange, maroon, rose, violet, green, white, and yellow. [6]
Endnotes
- See, for example, the uncriticised anecdotes given in Sully's Studies in Childhood.
- My first discussion of it was in Science, New York, April 21, 1893. The work of Warner, The Development of Mental Faculty, also proceeds upon the study of movement.
- A good instance of such confusion, between red and blue, and its correct interpretation, is given by Miss Shinn, Notes on the Development of a Child, Part I., pp. 38 and 50.
- Professor Preyer later wrote me, that he also saw this in 1882; but his experiments appear of doubtful success (see Mind of the Child, English translation, Pt. I., pp. 11, 15, 19).
- See the discussion of the question of tone recognition, below, Chap. XIV., § 3.
- Calculated from Binet's detailed results (Revue Philosophique, 1890, II, 582 ff.) by Mr. F. Tracy; see his book, The Psychology of Childhood, p. 14, and cf. the results to my own experiments below, Chap. IV., § 1.
§ 2. Expositiory
This colour question may suffice to make clear the essentials of a true experimental method. Only when we catch the motor response, or a direct reflex, in its simplicity, is it a true index of the sensory stimulus in its simplicity. I have accordingly attempted to reach a method of child study of such a character as to yield a series of experiments whose results would be in terms of the most fundamental motor reactions of the infant, which could be easily and pleasantly conducted, and which would be of wide application. The child's hand movements are, I think, the most nearly ideal
(41) in this respect. The hand reflects the first stimulations, the most stimulations, and, becoming the most mobile and executive organ of volition, attains the most varied and interesting offices of utility. We have spontaneous arm and hand movements, reflex movements, reaching-out movements, grasping movements, imitative movements, manipulating movements, and voluntary efforts -- all these, in order, reflecting the development of the mind. The organs of speech are only later brought into use, and their use for speech involves an already high development of mind, hence the error in many results. It has accordingly seemed to me worth while to find whether a child's reaching movements would reflect with any degree of regularity the modifications of its sensibility, [1] and, if so, how far this could be made a method of experimenting with young children. [2]
I may adduce one or two considerations which tend to show that some such 'dynamogenic ' method is theoretically valid. There are some results already recognized in the psychology of sense and movement which lend confirmation to this idea. The facts that the most motile organs have acutest sensibility, notably the hand and fingers; that certain marked types of action, such as imitation, arise early in connection with the hand; that the central organic preparation for volition is secured first in the arrangements for hand movements, [3] -- all these facts indicate that the hand
(42) movements are the best index of general and special sensibility in the infant. Fere maintains that sensory stimulations of all kinds increase the maximum hand pressure. Colours seen have regular, and each its peculiar, effect upon movement. Tones have similar influence. The ticking of a watch is more clearly perceived if movements are made at the same time. Further, the reaction-time of hand movements is shorter if the stimulus (sound, etc.) be more intense. There is an enlargement of the hand, through increased blood pressure, when a loud sound is heard. The fact of muscle reading, and its experimental demonstration by Gley and Jastrow, together with the series of facts shown by recent experiments in so-called 'unconscious movements' by diseased patients, [4] -- these, and a variety of other facts upon which the law of 'dynamogenesis' rests, seem to afford justification for the view that the infant's hand movements in reaching and grasping are the best index of the kind and intensity of its sensory experiences. Magendie [5] long ago suggested measuring changes in sensibility by the corresponding changes in blood pressure.
Further, it is not necessary to embarrass ourselves with the question whether the hand movements are voluntary or not. However we may differ as to the circumstances of the rise of volition, it is still true that after its rise the child's reactions are for a long time quite under the lead of its sensory life. It lives so fully in the immediate present and so closely in touch with its environment, that the influences which lead to movement can be detected with great regularity. In this case the sensations which are stimuli to movement become what we may also call 'effort stimuli,' and the child's efforts with his hands become indications of the relative degree of discrimination, attractive-
(43)-ness, etc., of the different sensations which call the efforts out.
Suppose we hang up a piece of meat over Carlo's head and tell him to jump for it. His first jump falls short of the meat. He jumps again and clears a greater distance. Why does he jump farther the second time? Not because he argues that a harder jump is necessary to secure the meat; but because by the first jump he got more smell, blood colour, and appetite stimulus from the meat. Now suppose it to be a red rag instead of meat, and Carlo refuse to jump a second time. This is not because he concludes the rag would choke him, but because he gets a kind of sensation which takes away what appetite stimulus he had before. The thing is a thing of sensational dynamogeny of 'suggestion,' and the child's state of mind up to his twenty-fourth month, more or less, is just about the same.
The following questions, I think, might be taken up by some such method as this: --
1. The presence of different colour sensations as shown by the number and persistence of the child's efforts to grasp the colour: the problem of colour perception.
2. The relative attractiveness of different colours measured in the same way: the problems of colour preference and distinction.
3. The relative attractiveness of different colour combinations.
4. The relative exactness of distance estimation as shown by the child's efforts to reach over distances for objects.
5. The relative attractiveness of different visual outlines (stars, circles, etc.) cut in the same attractive colour, etc.
6. The relative use of right, left, and both hands.
7. The rise of imitative movements.
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8. The rise of voluntary movements.
9. The presence and character of 'accompanying movements' at different stages of motor development.
10. The strength of desire and voluntary inhibition as shown in the relative persistence of movements of grasping.
11. The relative strength of disparate sensations at different periods of child life, as shown by their comparative expression in movement.
12. The inhibiting influence of elementary associations, especially pains, punishments, etc.
I am quite aware of the meagreness of this list; but one has only to remember the fact that there is no such thing yet as a psycho-physics of the active life, that this side of psychology is almost terra incognita to the experimentalist.' If the method prove reliable in one-half of these questions, then so much gain. I have applied it to some of them in a more or less incomplete way, in the case of my two children, H. and E., both girls, with the results recorded in subsequent pages of this book. In each case below I take occasion to say to what extent the results are of real, or only of methodological, value.
Endnotes
- Illustrating 'dynamogenesis: the general principle that " every stimulus has motor force" (see my Handbook of Psychol., Feeling and Will, pp. 28, 281).
- The suggestion of Mrs. Ladd Franklin (The Psychological Review I., 1894, p. 202) is quite in accord with this requirement, i.e. that Sach's discovery of reflex changes in the width of the pupil when certain colours are looked at might be used to test the colour sensations of very young children.
- Soltmann; cf. the chapter below on the 'Origin of Volition,' especially Pp. 421, 424.
- Binet, Janet.
- Féré, Sensation et Mouvement, p. 56.
- I see no reason that a method could not be devised for testing the motive influences of presentations of a neutral associational character in terms of the time elapsed since their experience. I have announced elsewhere (Proceedings of Congress for Exper. Psychology, London, 1892) the first results of a research conducted upon adults by such a method (see the experiments reported below, Chap. XIII., § 4). Professor Münsterberg has recently suggested a method of studying the influence of stimulations upon eye movements, attention, etc., which is also dynamogenic and proceeds upon somewhat the same presuppositions (The Psychological Review, I., pp. 441 ff., September, 1894).
§ 3. Formula of the Dynamogenic Method
When this method is reduced to its lowest terms, as applied to children old enough to reach out for objects which they
(45) see, two variable quantities are always involved. The reactions will vary in some way with the distance of the object exposed, and also in some way with the kind of stimulus. For example, a child of perhaps eight months of age reaches after an orange, when it is eleven inches in front of him, with great regularity; but very irregularly, or possibly not at all, when it is fourteen inches away. Again, he reaches for a colour, red, when perhaps he would not for a colourless object.
If we take the simplest cases -- cases in which observation shows the responses of the
child to be regular, the conditions of quiet, comfortable position, interest, etc., being
throughout normal and undisturbed -- we may consider these two things, quality and
distance, as the only important variables. By quality is meant the so-called sensational
character of the stimulating object. If, then, we further inquire into the drawing-out
influence of various stimulations, it is evident that it will vary with the quality (q),
and, in some inverse ratio, with the distance (d). In other words, naming the
calling-out or dynamogenic influence of a stimulus D, we have the equation,
D= K x q/d,
in which K is the sign of proportion.
I state this formula, not to be mathematical, but simply, by ringing the changes possible through substitution of values, to illustrate the applications of the method and the limits of the general principle of reaction. If q be kept constant, experiments will determine the law by which the influence of d changes. Again, experiments at different ages would show the effect on d of experience in associating visual distance with muscular distance. Again, keeping d
(46) constant, experiments would show the value of various sense qualities, the q values.
An interesting point emerges when we inquire the effect of zero and infinity values. If the child, for example, always reaches for a colour at nine inches, this would be practically the case of d = 0. For, as a matter of fact, distance then has no influence; the whole possible variation in D in successive experiments with different q's is due to the q-values themselves. It is asked at once why the influence of d is not equally ruled out in any series of experiments in which d is kept constant, say at twelve inches. The answer is: because in each such series the influence of d changes from the fact of practice, habit, and slight fatigue. If the child reaches for a blue-q at twelve inches, and just gets it, he may then reach for a green-q with greater avidity at twelve inches than he would otherwise have reached for the same green-q at nine inches. So psychology interferes with mathematics. The value for d = 0 at which we have the purest influence of q, is not the least distance possible, but the child's normal reaching distance.
Again, if the child just refrains from reaching for a q at fourteen inches, this means practically that d = infinity; that is, the influence of d is so all-important that it shuts out all relative q-influences. The distance inhibits movement altogether. But just here another psychological factor interferes with the mathematics; in some cases the inhibition of d does not work, and the child oversteps all its experience in violent straining and cries. These two so-called psychological 'interferences' are referred to again later on, the latter being, I think, the main external channel of the rise of right- or left-handedness. [1]
These qualifications make it evident that this form of
(47) mathematical statement makes only -- what most appeals to mathematics in psychology are -- an artificial show of exactness. This method, like all other psychological methods' must be used with a thousand cautions and as many failures and the last condition of such experiments, as the first condition of all work with children, is sympathetic insight into their mental movements. Only such sympathy and insight can cope with the subtle responses which a wide-awake child makes to the most trifling variations in our treatment of him.
I shall now give further facts and experiments illustrating the regularity of the child's reactions, and so put in evidence the general principle of 'dynamogenesis,' upon which all motor development, both in the child and in the race, must ultimately rest.
Endnotes
- See below, Chap. IV.
