HOWARD C. WARREN, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY (Review) JOHN B. WATSON, NEW YORK CITY (Review) SHEPHERD I. FRANZ, UNIV. OF CALIF., So. BR. (Monographs) S. W. FERNBERGER, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA (Bulletin) CONTENTS EDWARD S. ROBINSON AND ARTHUR G. BILLS 415 Reading Reactions for Mathematical Formula: MILES A. TINKER..... 444 The Influence of Context upon Learning and Recall: SHUH PAN..... 468 FOR THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION BY THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW COMPANY PRINCE AND LEMON STS., LANCASTER, PA. Entered as second-class matter, July 1, 1920, at the post-office at Lancaster, Pa. of the American Psychological Association EDITED BY HOWARD C. WARREN, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY (Review) JOHN B. WATSON, 244 Madison Ave., New York (Review) SHEPHERD I. FRANZ, UNIV. OF CALIF., So. BR. (Monographs) MADISON BENTLEY, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS (J. of Exp. Psych.) S. W. FERNBERGER, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA (Bulletin) WALTER S. HUNTER, CLARK UNIVERSITY (Index) HERBERT S. 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Subscriptions, orders, and business communications may be sent direct to the PRINCETON, N. J. OFFICE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW COMPANY FOREIGN AGENTS: G. E. STECHERT & CO., London (2 Star Yard, Cary St., W.C.), Paris (16, rue de Condé) Exp Although the work decrement is one of the major phenomena of psychology, the experimental problems that it presents have not, in our opinion, received anything like the detailed attention that they deserve. If there is one truest generalization about the work decrement, it is a statement of its variability. Such a statement, of course, suggests the complexity of the principles underlying the losses in efficiency from relatively continuous work and, at the same time, points out an inevitable theoretical and experimental program. There is need for forgetting the ancient explanation of all sorts of decrements in terms of the depletion of a single supply of neural energy. And there is a further need for formulating the fundamental factors. in the decrement, whether their nature be physical, biological, or psychological. Among others, Thorndike,' Dodge,' Myers,3 and, more recently, one of the present writers, have sought to establish theoretical 1 E. L. Thorndike, Educ. Psychol., 1912, 3, 1-140 (espec. 111-125). 2 R. Dodge, The laws of relative fatigue, Psychol. Rev., 1917, 24, 89-113. a C. S. Myers, Conceptions of fatigue and adaptation, ibid., 1925, 32, 1–16. 4 E. S. Robinson, Principles of the work decrement, ibid., 1926, 33, 123-134. 415 frameworks adequate to encompass the multifarious facts involved in the psychological work decrement. But experiment, we believe it fair to say, has lagged behind theoretical analysis. While theory has tended to see much more in the ordinary work decrement than refractoriness of tissue, experiment with typical psychological processes has been resorted to but little. Relations have been made out between the magnitude of the decrement and the type of efficiency considered, accuracy, speed, or satisfyingness,5,6 and between the magnitude of the decrement and the age and race of the workers.7, 8 But these are only beginnings. There is some question, too, how near these studies have come to the heart of the problem. It was our purpose in the experiments reported in this paper to study some of the fundamental conditions of variability in the magnitude of the work decrement as it occurs in processes of a predominantly psychological kind. II. THE FACTOR OF HOMOGENEITY-HETEROGENEITY We selected as our first factor for investigation the homogeneity of the work. In common thought, relatively homogeneous work is often considered to be more susceptible to 'fatigue' than work containing a greater variety of partactivities. Such work is, of course, most often characterized in terms of its subjective or affective nature, that is, in terms of its monotony, rather than in terms of its objective homogeneity. But in any event the factor of homogeneity, or monotony, seemed worth bringing under experimental control. Not only has it been assigned a position of importance by popular thought, but scientific considerations also suggest reasons why its importance should be expected. As Verwornꞌ and others have shown, refractoriness of living tissue to stimu 'E. L. Thorndike, Fatigue in a complex function, Psychol. Rev., 1914, 21, 402–407. 6 Sam?, The curve of work and the curve of satisfyingness, J. Appl. Psychol., 1917, 1, 265-267. 'T. R. Garth, Mental fatigue during continuous exercise of a single function, Arch. of Psychol., 1918, no. 26. 8 Same, Racial differences in mental fatigue, J. Appl. Psychol., 1920, 4, 235–244. 'M. Verworn, Irritability, a physiological analysis of the general effect of stimuli in living substance, 1913, 154-188. lation repeated within certain time-limits is one of the most general of biological principles. That this same refractoriness is present throughout the range of psychologically described phenomena is too familiar a fact to need discussion. Now it is the broad principle of refractoriness of response that gives a basis for interpreting the influence of homogeneity of work upon the magnitude of the work decrement. The fewer the part-activities involved in continuous work the shorter will be the time-intervals between the successive stimulations of each of these activities and, within a given time-range, the more frequent will be those successive stimulations. As one of us has previously pointed out,10 the degree of refractoriness is a function of both the recency and the frequency with which an activity is called upon to function. From this we should expect the continuance of relatively homogeneous work to be somewhat hindered by the factor of refractoriness. It was our program, then, to select for experimental purposes a number of tasks differing from one another mainly in homogeneity and to compare the magnitudes of the decrements associated with continued work at these several tasks. A. Experiment 1: Writing (Unbroken Sequences) Procedure: The general activity utilized in our first experiment consisted in the writing of alphabetical sequences of letters. Three degrees of heterogeneity were secured by requiring the subjects to write such a two-letter sequence as ababab, etc., or such a three-letter sequence as abcabc, etc., or the six-letter sequence abcdefabcdef, etc. In order that we might treat our three degrees of heterogeneity as quantitatively definable, we provided that, in the course of each cycle of experimentation, the twoletter work should include all of the letters involved in the three-letter and six-letter work, and likewise that the three-letter work should include all of the letters involved in the six-letter work. There were thus 3 varieties of two-letter work as follows: ababab... There were 2 varieties of three-letter work: abcabc. 10 Psychol. Rev., 1926, 33, 127-129. |