Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/420

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406
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. II.

2. The subjective element of recognition in general is due to the association between the constant "motor ingredients" of mental states, and the motor elements of the attention.

3. All pitch reproduction is auditive. Pitch recognition (absolute) is due to association between the motor ingredients of pitch qualities and the motor elements of the attention.

4. Verbal reproduction is of several types — motor, visual, auditory, etc. Verbal recognition is due to association of the motor elements of that memory image which most readily stimulates the attention, with the motor elements of the attention.

5. The existence of memory types is due to the education of the attention under the operation of the "law of sensori-motor association": the motor ingredients of a particular kind of memories become in this way implicated, by association, with the motor elements of the attention.

6. The facts that "increased intensity of sensation draws the attention," and that "attention increases the intensity of sensation," are both explained as partial statements of the "law of sensori-motor association."

7. The facts, also, that "increased intensity of stimulus shortens reaction time," and that "motor reactions are shorter than sensory reactions," are explained as deductions from the law of "sensori-motor association." This law also — with the memory types which it produces — explains the discrepancies reported by different observers in the matter of sensory and motor reactions.[1]

J. Mark Baldwin.

  1. It is evident that the general position taken in this paper bears in favor of central, as opposed to exclusively peripheral, control in voluntary movement. The correlation of various images in the attention, through their respective ' motor ingredients,' is necessary for voluntary activity; and when a particular class of images is lost, the damage it works in the mental life is not alone the narrowing of the content in consciousness, but it is in many cases the withdrawing of that support without which the voluntary function can not proceed at all. It is in the coordination of the attention, therefore — what I have elsewhere called "volitional apperception" — that every one of the incoming sensory elements must have part, at least, of its regulating effect upon the efferent discharge. This is shown so clearly, as a matter of fact in the elaborate article by Pick on the loss of voluntary