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Career Highlights VOL. 51, No. 4 JULY, 1944 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW JAMES McKEEN CATTELL 1860-1944 In the history of American psychology both of these men. A paper on Lotze very few figures are so outstanding as won for Cattell a fellowship in philoso- that of James McKeen Cattell whose phy at Johns Hopkins, where he spent long and active life has just come to a the year of 1882-83, with John Dewey close. He did not, indeed, belong to the and Joseph Jastrow as fellow students. first generation of American scientific It was during this year that Stanley psychologists—consisting mainly of Wil- Hall set up his psychological laboratory liam James, G. Stanley Hall and George at Johns Hopkins, with some assistance Trumbull Ladd—but he was probably from this group of students, and it was the most influential of the second gen- there, apparently, that Cattell began his eration which included Titchener, Miins- "psychometric investigations," concerned terberg, James Mark Baldwin, Jastrow, with the timing of various mental proc- Sanford, and Scripture, with others com- esses. He took his data and his designs ing along just a little later. Though for improved apparatus back to Ger- Cattell was not a systematist and did not many the following year and remained found a school in that sense, he was the in Wundt's laboratory for the three leader in what became a widespread and years, 1883-1886, being for part of this distinctive movement in American psy- time Wundt's first laboratory assistant. chology. His interest from the very out- From the outset Cattell seems to have set of his career was in introducing quan- been impressed with the variability of titative methods into psychology and human performance and the consequent especially in using such methods for the need for long series of observations in measurement of individual differences. order to reach reliable results. He set Cattell graduated in 1880 from Lafa- up his apparatus in his own rooms at yette College, of which his father was Leipzig so that he could work longer the president. His undergraduate in- hours than Wundt permitted in the labo- terests had centered largely on literature. ratory, and carried out an extraordi- His first step toward a professional ca- narily thorough and extensive study of reer, however, was to go to Europe for reaction times, ranging all the way from the study of philosophy. He heard the simple reaction through the reac- Wundt lecture at Leipzig and Lotze at tions with discrimination and choice up Gottingen and was much impressed by to free and controlled association. Re- action time was of course no novelty in James McKeen Cattell was the joint founder the Leipzig laboratory, being in fact a with James Mark Baldwin of THE PSYCHO- LOGICAL REVIEW in 1894. He was co-editor line of experiment on which Wundt was of the Review with Baldwin until 1904, each pinning great hopes. Cattell's concep- editing it on alternate years. THE EDITOR. tion of reaction time studies, however, 201 202 R. S. WOODWORTH differed radically from that of Wundt. shortly afterward, Cattell carried on ex- Wundt hoped by variation of the experi- tensive work in another of the classical ment, with certain introspective con- fields of experimental psychology, psy- trols, to tease out the time constants for chophysics, (5, 6). Here, as well as in elementary mental processes such as per- reaction time, he broke away from the ception, choice and association. Cattell older view of these experiments as being found that he could not himself carry concerned with the measurement of con- out the required introspections and sub- sciousness and substituted a more objec- jective controls, and he came to doubt tive and operational conception. Ex- the ability of others to do so. It seemed periments using the method of right and to him that the simple reaction became wrong cases or of constant stimuli, for with practice a "prepared reflex" and example, are not directed operationally that in the more complex reactions the toward the measurement of intensity of constituent processes overlapped in time sensation. They are experiments in ob- and so could not be measured. Yet the servation and judgment and the results reaction time experiment, he still held, come out as measurements of the error was of great value as a tool for deter- of observation. Psychophysics, accord- mining the speed and difficulty of many ingly, should be conceived as a study everyday mental processes. He could of accuracy of observation under dif- show, for example, that the time re- ferent conditions—a study of obvious quired to read a short familiar word was practical importance. It seemed to Cat- no greater than that required to read a tell more in accordance with the theory single letter, so that the practice then of probability (a theory in which he coming into vogue of teaching the child took much interest) to expect the error to read whole words before the single of observation to increase as the square letters had a scientific basis. Without root of the observed magnitude, rather pretending to analyze the complex proc- than in direct proportion to that magni- esses into their elements, Cattell used the total reaction time obtained under tude as asserted in Weber's law. As a various conditions for studying atten- matter of fact, the data usually come out tion, fatigue and practice, for comparing between these two formulas. That is, the legibility of the different letters of the error of observation usually increases the alphabet and for many other prac- less rapidly than Weber's law would pre- tical and scientific purposes. dict but more rapidly than predicted by Cattell's square root law. Cattell's Leipzig studies were all con- A little later (12), by combining his cerned with time, but they were not lim- interests in psychophysics and reaction ited to reaction time (3). He used his time, Cattell invented a new psycho- 'fall tachistoscope' also for determining physical method, the discrimination time the exposure time necessary for perceiv- method for indicating the difference be- ing colors, pictures, letters and words tween magnitudes or qualities—the (2). He also made an interesting use larger the effective difference, the quicker of a serial exposure apparatus (1)—a the discrimination. type of experiment which has not been Though differing with Wundt on some followed up as much as it deserves. matters of theory, Cattell always re- Cattell continued to use the reaction tained a warm personal affection for his time method in important later studies master and a high respect for his serv- (7) and directed quite a number of his ices as a founder of experimental psy- Columbia students in similar work. chology. After leaving Leipzig Cattell Not during his years at Leipzig, but soon came into personal contact with JAMES MCKEEN CATTELL 203 Francis Galton—"the greatest man of the correlational method in psychol- whom I have known"—and was con- ogy (28). firmed by Galton in his own long-held Cattell's plan of testing separate view that the measurement of individual functions—the senses, quickness of differences would be one of the most fer- movement, perception of time, memory, tile fields for the new psychology. Cat- imagery, etc.—was rather left behind tell was perhaps the first (1890) to use with the appearance of Binet's method the term mental tests, and he thus ex- of testing intelligence, though it is more pressed his high hopes regarding them: in line with recent efforts to develop tests for specific mental abilities. Psychology cannot attain the certainty Reaction time, psychophysics, and and exactness of the physical sciences, un- tests were thus the main lines of Cat- less it rests on a foundation of experiment tell's early researches. A minor exten- and measurement. A step in this direction sion of his work on errors of observa- could be made by applying a series of men- tion is of historic interest as being prob- tal tests and measurements to a large num- ber of individuals. The results would be ably the first study of the reliability of of considerable scientific value in discover- testimony. He wrote: ing the constancy of mental processes, their ... we do not know how likely it is that interdependence, and their variation under a piece of testimony is true, or how the de- different circumstances. Individuals, be- gree of probability varies under different sides, would find their tests interesting, conditions. If we could learn this by ex- and, perhaps, useful in regard to training, periment the result would be a contribution mode of life or indication of disease (4, p. to psychology, and would at the same time 373). have certain important practical applica- tions (8, p. 761). At this time he described a series of ten tests which he apparently was using His experiment consisted in asking at the University of Pennsylvania. college students questions about dis- Shortly afterwards, at Columbia, he de- tances on the campus, the weather a veloped a more extensive list, known week before, the dates of certain histori- for many years as the Freshman Tests, cal events, etc. He found wide indi- though they had nothing to do with the vidual variation in the students' answers. admission of freshmen to college (10). In some cases the average of the answers They were given to 50 or more volun- was close to the truth while in other teers from each successive freshman cases there was a large constant error. class, in order to obtain data for the When students were asked what was said study of individual differences and the during the first two minutes of the lecture factors on which the differences depend.
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