galton.org 143
Psychometric Experiments
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over, that the words were divisible into three distinct groups. The first
contained “abbey,” “aborigines,” “abyss,” and others that admitted of
being presented under some mental image. The second group contained
“abasement,” “abhorrence,” “ablution,” etc., which admitted excellently
of histrionic representation. The third group contained the more abstract
words, such as “afternoon,” “ability,” “abnormal,” which were variously
and imperfectly dealt with by my mind. I give the results in the upper part
of Table III., and, in order to save trouble, I have reduced them to
percentages in the lower lines of the Table.
TABLE III.
COMPARISON BETWEEN THE QUALITY OF THE WORDS AND THAT
OF THE IDEAS IN IMMEDIATE ASSOCIATION WITH THEM.
Purely Verbal.
Number
of words
in each
series.
Sense
Imagery
Histrionic
Names
of
persons
Phrases and
Quotations
Total
26
"Abbey" series
46
12
32
17
107
20
“Abasement”,,
25
26
11
17
79
29
“Afternoon” ,,
23
27
16
38
104
75
290
“Abbey” Series
43
11
30
16
100
“Abasement” ,,
32
33
13
22
100
“Afternoon” ,,
22
25
16
37
100
We see from this that the associations of the “abbey” series are nearly
half of them in sense imagery, and these were almost always visual. The
names of persons also more frequently occurred in this series than in any
other. It will be recollected that in Table II. I drew attention to the
exceptionally large number, 33, in the last column. It was perhaps 20 in
excess of what would have been expected
