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ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
SECTION OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY. 
November 22, 1909. 
Section met in conjunction with the New York Branch of the American 
Psychological Association at 8:15 P. m., Prof. J. McK. Cattell presiding in 
the absence of the chairman. 
The minutes of the last meeting of the Section were read and approved. 
The following programme was then offered: 
Edward L. Thorndike, Some New Data on Fatigue. 
A. J. Rosanoff and 
Miss G. H. Kent, A Preliminary Report of a Statistical Study of 
Association. 
R. S. Woodworth, An Attempt to Standardize Certain Tests of Con¬ 
trolled Association. 
F. Lyman Wells, The Meaning of the Association Test. 
Summary of Papers. 
Professor Thorndike reported on sixteen subjects worked from 300 to 
700 minutes with no rest or only a short rest for luncheon. The work was 
the mental multiplication of three-place by three-place numbers. Each 
subject was tested again after a rest of 12 hours or more. The loss in effi¬ 
ciency was not great, being more than counterbalanced by the practise 
effect and was not closely correlated with subjective estimates of fatigue. 
Dr. Rosanoff and Miss Kent, with the object in view of deriving a normal 
standard of association to be used in a study of disturbance of flow of thought 
in insanity, applied Sommer’s association test, in a form modified by them, 
to one thousand normal persons. In their attempts to analyze and classify 
the results, they found it necessary to depart from the methods of grouping 
reactions which had been generally in vogue, but found that for their purposes 
the most useful distinction was that between common and individual reac¬ 
tions. With but few exceptions, records from normal persons contain not 
over ten per cent, of individual reactions. In cases of insanity, over fifty 
per cent, of individual reactions were frequently obtained. The distinction 
between a common and an individual reaction can be readily made by 
reference to the tables compiled by the authors on the basis of the thousand 
normal records already referred to. The authors believe that the diagnosis 
