The Mind of the Child - Child Psychology : Part 3

The Story of the Mind
by James Mark Baldwin

(Page 6 of 21)

As yet many of the observations which we have in this field were made by the average mother, who knows less about the human body than she does about the moon or the wild flowers, or by the average father, who sees his child for an hour a day, when the boy is dressed up, and who has never slept in the same room with him - let alone the same bed! - in his life; by people who have never heard the distinction between reflex and voluntary action, or that between nervous adaptation and conscious choice. The difference between the average mother and the good psychologist is this: she has no theories, he has; he has no interests, she has. She may bring up a family of a dozen and not be able to make a single trustworthy observation; he maybe able, from one sound of one yearling, to confirm theories of the neurologist and educator, which are momentous for the future training and welfare of the child.

As for experimenting with children, only the psychologist should undertake it. The connections between the body and the mind are so close in infancy, the mere animal can do so much to ape reason, and the child is so helpless under the leading of instinct, impulse, and external necessity, that the task is excessively difficult - to say nothing of the extreme delicacy and tenderness of the budding tendrils of the mind. But others do experiment! Every time we send a child out of the home to the school, we subject him to experiment of the most serious and alarming kind. He goes into the hands of a teacher who is often not only not wise unto the child's salvation, but who is, perchance, a machine for administering a single experiment to an infinite variety of children. It is perfectly certain that a great many of our children are irretrievably damaged or hindered in their mental and moral development in the school; but we can not be at all sure that they would fare any better if they were taught at home! The children are experimented with so much and so unwisely, in any case, that possibly a little intentional experiment, guided by real insight and psychological information, would do them good.

Methods of experimenting with Children. - In endeavoring to bring such questions as the degree of memory, recognition, association, etc., present in an infant, to a practical test, considerable embarrassment has always been experienced in understanding the child's vocal and other responses. Of course, the only way a child's mind can be studied is through its expressions, facial, lingual, vocal, muscular; and the first question - i.e., What did the infant do? must be followed by a second - i.e., What did his doing that mean? The second question is, as I have said, the harder question, and the one which requires more knowledge and insight. It is evident, on the surface, that the further away we get in the child's life from simple inherited or reflex responses, the more complicated do the processes become, and the greater becomes the difficulty of analyzing them, and arriving at a true picture of the real mental condition which lies back of them.

To illustrate this confusion, I may cite one of the few problems which psychologists have attempted to solve by experiments on children: the determination of the order of rise of the child's perceptions of the different colors. The first series of experiments consisted in showing the child various colors and requiring him to name them, the results being expressed in percentages of correct answers to the whole number. Now this experiment involves no less than four different questions, and the results give absolutely no clew to their separation. It involves:

1. The child's distinguishing different colors displayed simultaneously before it, together with the complete development of the eyes for color sensation. 2. The child's ability to recognize or identify a color after having seen it once. 3. An association between the child's color seeing and word hearing and speaking memories, by which the proper name for the colors is brought up in his mind. 4. Equally ready facility in the pronunciation of the various names of the colors which he recognizes; and there is the further embarrassment, that any such process which involves association of ideas, is as varied as the lives of children. The single fact that speech is acquired long after objects and some colors are distinguished, shows that results reached by this method have very little value as far as the problem of the first perception of colors is concerned.

That the fourth element pointed out above is a real source of confusion is shown by the fact that children recognize many words which they can not readily pronounce. When this was realized, a second phase in the development of the problem arose. A color was named, and then the child was required to pick out that color. This gave results different from those reached by the first method, blue and red leading the list in correct answers by the first method, while by this second method yellow led, and blue came near the end of the list.

The further objection that colors might be distinguished before the word names are learned, or that color words might be interchanged or confused by the child, gave rise to what we may call the third stage in the statement of the problem. The method of "recognition" took the place of the method of "naming." This consisted in showing to a child a colored disk, without naming it, and then asking him to pick out the same color from a number of colored disks.

This reduces the question to the second of the four I have named above. It is the usual method of testing for color blindness, in which, from defects of vision, certain colors can not be perceived at all. It answers very well for color blindness; for what we really want to learn in the case of a sailor or a signal-man is whether he can recognize a given signal when it is repeated; that is, does he know green or red to be the same as his former experience of green or red? But it is evident that there is still a more fundamental question in the matter - the real question of color perception. It is quite possible that a child might not recognize an isolated color when he could really very well distinguish the colors lying side by side. The last question, then, is this: When does the child get the different color Sensations (not recognitions), and in what order?

To solve this question it would seem that experiments should be made upon younger children. The results described above were all secured after the children had made considerable progress in learning to spoke.

To meet this requirement another method may be used which can be applied to children less than a year old. The colors are shown, and the child led to grasp after them. This method is of such a character as to yield a series of experiments whose results are in terms of the most fundamental movements of the infant; it can be easily and pleasantly conducted; and it is of wide application. The child's hand movements are nearly ideal in this respect. The hand reflects the child's first feelings, and becomes the most mobile organ of his volition, except his organs of speech. We find spontaneous arm and hand movements, reflex movements, reaching-out movements, grasping movements, imitative movements, manipulating movements, and voluntary efforts - all these, in order, reflecting the development of the mind.

Copyright 1902 by D. Appleton and Company.

About the Author

James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh. He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.