sider the activities of the mind as well as its knowledge and its interests.

3. Imagery of Children and Adults

[NORSWORTHY, Naomi and WHITLEY, Mary T., Psychology of Childhood, pp. 150-160. Copyright, 1923, by the Macmillan Co.] (Adapted.)

Children differ from adults in kind of images, in vividness of images, and in number of images. In childhood, the proportion of visual images is greater than at any other time. It is rare, however, that people can be divided distinctly into types. Most people are of a mixed type. One kind of imagery may be used in learning or recalling one kind of material, while some other kind of imagery may predominate in learning or recalling something else. Indeed, he may use one type of percept in learning a given sort of material and another kind of image may predominate in its recall. The type of image depends not so much on the individual as on the material, the extent to which purpose is involved, and on the presence of difficulties. Teachers are no longer advised to discover the imagery type of their pupils, but they are advised to use multiple sense appeal and utilize various types of imagery.

Children use more concrete imagery than adults. They use object imagery primarily, while adults use verbal or word type imagery. This is due to the fact that children are inclined to think in terms of objects, whereas adults find it more convenient to deal with words. Verbal imagery is more economical of time and energy, of definiteness and accuracy, and of retention. It is indispensable in all cases of abstract thinking and constructive work. The business of the teacher, here, is to replace the less effective object-image with the more serviceable word-image. It means a broadening of sense experience and a direct connection of words with it, and more definite training in thinking in terms of language. Indeed, the well-trained mind gets along with a minimum of verbal images. The training of children along this line should begin in the first grade. Object-imagery is no longer thought to be indispensable to verbal imagery.

The reproductive type of imagery is probably the fundamental and earlier kind of imagery. This is especially true of children under three. Between three and eight there are definite evidences of creative imagination. Between ten and thirteen, the imagery is made realistic as the productive imagery loses its fanciful characteristics. During adolescence, the imagery takes on many characteristics of the first period, though different in content. It has to do with the adolescent's own doings, ambitions, dreams, plans and achievements, and may be termed idealistic. With the passing of adolescence, the emotional and fanciful type of imagination gives way for the practical.

Children should be given many opportunities to create and to reconstruct the old into a new thing. Whether it be writing poetry, making machinery, designing costumes, or finding cures for the social ills, children should be stimulated, directed and inspired to do the creative thing. It is the business of the teacher to set free the creative spirit, not to kill it by pressure brought to bear in the demand for the reproductive.

Owing to the subjective character of the adolescent's imagery, it is advisable that he develop a strong and healthy body and mind by sufficient outside interest, plays and games, companionship, and so on. His imagination should be fed by wholesome and suitable material good from the standpoint and need of the adolescent. He needs the sympathetic understanding of a wise adult who will keep alive in him the belief in his own ability. The adviser must aim to direct his attention more and more to the doings of others, to build his images and ideas into ideals, to bring a balance between the introvert and extrovert tendencies; and at the same time preserve much of his fertility and power of imagination.

The images of children are more vivid and intense than those of adults. This is very evident when children are unable to distinguish between percepts and images. Experiments show that adults have the same difficulty under certain conditions. Children fail to make the distinction on account of the meagerness of their experience. They lack definite

criteria by which to judge the real from the imagined. Furthermore, their possibility of error is increased by their credulity, and extreme suggestibility.

4. Mental Imagery

[BETTS, George H., The Distribution and Functions of Mental Imagery, Contributions to Education, No. 26, pp. 94-99. New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1909.]

1. Comparing the results of the experiments on voluntary imagery with those of spontaneous imagery, it is evident that most persons can command a far wider range and greater profusion of imagery than they normally employ in thinking.

2. There are two points in our thinking at which imagery has the greatest tendency to emerge. (1) At points where our thinking is baffled; (2) at points where percepts would be of great assistance. If the baffled are not dependent on percepts, the images which offer are usually for the most part irrelevant, and hence of no possible service in reaching the solution. The most efficient and successful thinking, at least of logical and abstract nature, is with most persons accompanied by the least imagery.

3. Thinking can and does go on without the intervention of imagery, the mental content being made up of feelings of meaning, relation, intention, effort, identity, interest, pleasure, displeasure, etc. Imagery may and often does serve as a familiar background for the meaning with which we are dealing, but it cannot be said to be essential to meaning, except to the extent that meaning may inhere in a given percept as such, e.g., the meaning of a beautiful sunset is chiefly this same beautiful sunset. The meaning of yesterday's sunset, which I can no longer see may depend largely on my visual image of it. But all meanings of logical sort, that is, those which grow out of relations, not only are not an image, but are independent of it except for the accident of association, by which a meaning may call up an image equally well with an image calling up a meaning. Whatever the logical theories against it, imageless thought "is an apparent fact of introspection," as shown over and over in the foregoing experiment. . .

4. Imagery as a mental standard in discrimination, as of magnitudes, pitches of tones, and shades of gray, is of doubtful service. And, unless the images are very clear and vivid, they are probably in the way of accurate discrimination.

...

5. Very much of memory is accomplished without the use of imagery, and much of the imagery which accompanies memory is of no advantage to it. The "memory image," used as a general term to cover all memory stuff, is a fiction. In one of the hardest possible tests on memory, and one most calculated to evoke images, namely, that on the memory of unrelated characters, imagery failed to make any convincing showing of its utility. The universal experience in this experiment was that the mind sought to establish some form of association upon which to depend in recall, even in cases where the imagery also appeared. This is but another evidence of the mind's tendency to deal in relations instead of detached pictures. Even if the relations must be arbitrarily set up, as when the letters of the tests were made to stand for certain names, the majority of minds will prefer this method to that of dependency on imagery. . . .

6. Imagery is much less closely connected with the appreciation and enjoyment of literature than is commonly supposed. While a great deal of imagery undoubtedly accompanies the reading of descriptive literature, yet much of it is merely associative and incidental, and in the degree in which the meaning of the production becomes familiar, the imagery has a tendency to drop out. It is finally the sentiments, feeling, meaning, and other of the deep qualities which come to stand for the selection in the mind's grasp and appreciation of it. These mental elements may be associated with images, or may arise directly from the language symbols of the production. Absence of imagery does not therefore mean failure adequately to interpret and appreciate literature. . .

7. Finally, it seems that imagery has been greatly over-emphasized as to its relative importance as mental content. Images, along with sensations, have been said by many writers to represent the entire mental content on the cognitive side. They have been assumed by others to be the only stuff of memory, the basis of all thought and meaning, and the condition of all æsthetic enjoyment from literature. So all-inclusive has the word "imagery" become that it has been claimed that all past experience on the mental side is conserved in the form of images, and hence any vestiges of experience, no matter what their nature, have been denominated mental images. In so far as the results from the foregoing experiments are trustworthy, it has been shown that all these claims are greatly overstated, and that in many instances they are wholly at variance with the facts.

Imagery probably has some function, just how important no one can yet say, in the development of content in speech and language; it gives to the child's world of imagination a touch of reality that means much to his play life; it gives the adult material for his dreams; it serves us all in some degree where we would be glad to use percepts but find them lacking; it gives a dash of life and color to much of our thinking which else would be cold and lifeless. But imagery is after all only one mental element among many, and in adult thinking at least, may often drop out altogether without any way hampering the efficiency of the other mental elements, but, on the contrary, often even increasing their efficiency by getting out of the way...

5. Adaptation to Image Type

[THORNDIKE, E. L., Principles of Teaching, pp. 90-92. New York, A. G. Seiler, 1916.]

The wise course then is to arrange stimuli to appeal through several sense avenues, but to let the emphasis be on the kind of responses of action or inference that the pupil makes, not upon the kind of imagery by means of which he proceeds to that response.

Although the cultivation of the capacities for imaging is hardly worth while, the methods commonly taken to cultivate them are for other reasons very useful. Thus it is an excellent exercise to have one pupil describe a tree that he has seen and let the others decide what kind of a tree it is. The value of such exercise does not, however, lie in the improvement of the capacity for imaging. In our illustration the boy who describes and the others who decide what is described may or may not base their conclusions on visual images. But they must, to describe clearly and to infer correctly from the description, know certain realities about trees. To ask a student, 'If you were a creature who could see clearly at a distance of two thousand miles and were hundreds of miles in the air above St. Louis, what would be some of the important features that you would see to the west? To the east? To the north? To the south? to say, 'Suppose that you had lived in Illinois 200 years ago, how would the country have looked, what would you have seen the inhabitants doing?' to say, "Think now of just how the oak leaf and the chestnut leaf look so as to tell me the difference between them,'-these are useful exercises because right re