300 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



SECTION OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY. 



November 26, 1906. 



The Section met in conjunction with the New York Section of the 

 American Psychological Association at 4 P. M. at the Psychological 

 Laboratory, Colmnbia University, and at 8: 15 P. M. at the American 

 Museum of Natural History. 



The minutes of the previous meeting of the Section were read and ap- 

 proved. 



The following program was presented: 



Afternoon session. 



F. Lyman Wells, Linguistic Ability and Intellectual Efficiency. 



Kate Gordon, Esthetics of Simple Color-Arrangements. 



A. H. Pierce, Gustatory Audition. 



Harvey Carr, The Pendular Whip-lash Illusion of Motion. 



Evening session. 



Robert MacDougall, Imaginative Thought as Adaptive Response. 

 Brother Chrysostom, Psychology and Spelling. 

 John Dewey, Knowledge and Judgment, 



Summary of Papers. 



The paper by Dr. Wells was published in full in the Journal of Phil- 

 osophy for December 6, 1906. 



Dr. Gordon presented the results of experiments on the esthetics of 

 simple color arrangements. She sought to arrange colors in a field in a 

 manner someu'hat similar to the usual massing of colors in a painting. 

 Her figures were composed of large and small triangles of color arranged 

 symmetrically about a point, and with bases turned toward each other. 

 Red, yellow, green and blue were the colors used, and these and the trian- 

 gles were arranged in all possible ways within the limits indicated. These 

 colors differed greatly in brightness, and the results so far seem to show 

 that preferences depend almost entirely on the arrangements of brightness. 

 Small bright triangles surrounded by large dark ones were uniformly pre- 

 ferred. By control experiments it was found that this result depended 



