280 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE, ETC. 



if they did, we should have to conceive those capacities as already deter- 

 mined at birth and unalterable in after-life. Rather, it is said, the 

 processes of the mind consist essentially in specific associations between 

 definite situations and definite responses, these associations being due to 

 the formation of particular nerve-paths within the brain. Clearly, the 

 formation of one set of nerve-paths cannot influence the formation of 

 another set of nerve-paths, unless they themselves are linked by similar 

 associations.^ 



The experimental studies have been numerous. They have dealt 

 chiefly with such mental functions as memory, discrimination and manual 

 dexterity, and with such educational subjects as arithmetic, grammar, 

 geometry, science and Latin.^ Two restrictions should be noted. First, 

 in the experiments which endeavoured to isolate elementary psychological 

 functions, it is important to realise that the investigators deliberately 

 simplified the situation, and eliminated, so far as possible, emotional 

 factors like interest or ambition : hence it is not always fair to apply 

 direct to classroom conditions results obtained in the psychological 

 laboratory. Secondly, the experiments on educational subjects have 

 dealt almost exclusively with the influence of one school study upon 

 another : they have not attempted to evaluate the effect of such studies 

 upon the learner's interest, enjoyment and efficiency in after-life. 



The position reached may be stated thus : No psychologist would 

 doubt that under certain circumstances something very much like transfer 

 of improvement undoubtedly takes place. Accordingly psychologists are 

 now concerned rather to criticise the popular explanations of such transfer, 

 and to deny that it occurs so freely and so widely as has previously been 

 assumed. Hence in the most recent investigations the object has been, 

 not so much to discover whether there is any such thing as a transfer of 



''■ Compare Thorndike, Educational Psychology, vol. ii, pp. 359 and 418. Here 

 I am concerned only to state the argument in its most definite form. Probably few 

 psj'chologists in this country would accept the extreme associationist position as 

 stated in the text. English psychology now teaches us that, if situation S is 

 associated with reaction R, then, when a similar situation occurs in the form of Sj, 

 it calls up not R but Rj, where Rj : R :: S, : S. Thus, if the first bar of ' God Save 

 the King,' heard in the key of B flat, becomes associated with the second bar in the 

 same key, then, if a week later I hear the first bar in the key of C natural, I call up, 

 not the original continuation in the original key, but an analogous continuation 

 unconsciously transposed to the new key. This process, variously known as 

 ' relative suggestion ' or the ' eduction of correlates,' already implies a kind of transfer 

 of training in the very process of association itself. 



'^ For a recent summary of these experiments, see Whipple, Twenty-seventh Year 

 Book of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part II, pp. 186-197; Sandiford 

 Educatio7ial Psychology, pp. 279-289. Thorndike's elaborate investigations (' Mental 

 Discipline in High School Studies ' and ' A Second Study of Discipline in High School 

 Studies,' Journ. Educ. Psychol., xv. 1924 and xviii, 1927) deserve special mention as 

 among the most elaborate and the most recent. His conclusion maj' be quoted : 

 ' By any reasonable interpretation of the results, the intellectual values of studies 

 should be determined largely by the special information, habits, interests, attitudes 

 aad ideals which they demonstrably produce. The expectation of any large difference 

 in general improvement of the mind from one study rather than another seems 

 doomed to disappointment. The chief reason why good tlunkers seem superficially 

 to have been made such by having taken certain school studies, is that good thinkers 

 have taken such studies, becoming better by the inherent tendency of the good to 

 gain more than the poor from any study.' 



I 



