LABORATORY TESTS 113 



I now chose a group of ideas which are not normally asso- 

 ciated with a particular form of motor expression peculi- 

 arly characteristic of them, and sought to establish arti- 

 ficially such a connection with some arbitrary movement, 

 without consciousness of the process on the part of the 

 subject. Thus I asked one subject (Miss St.), who had 

 no intimation of the aim of the tests, to think of the fol- 

 lowing words in any order she might choose : " Ibis " 

 (ibis), "Irbis" (panther), " Kiebitz " (plover) and 

 " Kiirbis " (pumpkin). I said that I would react to her 

 thoughts by means of arm movements forward and back- 

 ward to the right and to the left, respectively. 15 out of 

 20 tests were successful, without the slightest suspicion 

 on the part of the subject (whose whole attention was 

 concentrated on the word-content), that she was giving 

 me the necessary directives in the form of very minute 

 movements of the head and eyes to the right and left, etc. 

 She was greatly astonished that I should be able to guess 

 words so much alike, — (she did not know that the ele- 

 ment of likeness was productive of no difficulty). When, 

 during one of the tests, the subject happened to think 

 spontaneously of the movement she was expecting me to 

 make, she became confused, and as a result the number 

 of my sucessful reactions suddenly fell. I never would 

 have discovered the cause, had not the subject enlightened 

 me without my asking. 



I repeated this series with three other persons, who 

 had had some psychological training. I did not use the 

 same movement for each word in all three cases, but in- 

 dicated the word " Kiebitz ", for instance, by means of an 

 upward movement in one case, by turning the head to the 

 right in another, etc. In one of the three cases the tests 

 were almost wholly unsuccessful. The cause for this 



