Principles Of Psychology Vol2
‘Perception-time.’
The time which the perceptive process occupies has been inquired into by various experimenters. Some call it perception-time, some choice-time, some discrimination-time. The results have been already given in Chapter XIII, to which the reader is consequently referred.
Dr. Romanes gives an interesting variation of these time-measurements. He found
“an astonishing difference between different individuals with respect to the rate at which they are able to read. Of course reading implies enormously intricate processes of perception both of the sensuous and of the intellectual order; but if we choose for these observations persons who have been accustomed to read much, we may consider that they are all very much on a par with respect to the amount of practice which they have had, so that the differences in their rates of reading may fairly be attributed to real differences in their rates of forming complex perceptions in rapid succession, and not to any merely accidental differences arising from greater or less facility acquired by special practice.
“My experiments consisted in marking a brief printed paragraph in a book which had never been read by any of the persons to whom it was to be presented. The paragraph, which contained simple statements of simple facts, was marked on the margin with pencil. The book was then placed before the reader open, the page, however, being covered with a sheet of paper. Having pointed out to the reader upon this sheet of paper what part of the underlying page the marked paragraph occupied, I suddenly removed the sheet of paper with one hand, while I started a chronograph with the other. Twenty seconds being allowed for reading the paragraph (ten lines octavo), as soon as the time was up I again suddenly placed the sheet of paper over the printed page, passed the book on to the next reader, and repeated the experiment as before. Meanwhile, the first reader, the moment after the book had been removed, wrote down all that he or she could remember having read. And so on with all the other readers.
“Now the results of a number of experiments conducted on this method were to show, as I have said, astonishing differences in the maximum rate of reading which is possible to different individuals, all of whom have been accustomed to extensive reading. That is to say, the difference may amount to 4 to 1; or, otherwise stated, in a given time one individual may be able to read four times as much as another. Moreover, it appeared that there was no relationship between slowness of reading and power of assimilation; on the contrary, when all the efforts are directed to assimilating as much as possible in a given time, the rapid readers (as shown by their written notes) usually give a better account of the portions of the paragraph which have been compassed by the slow readers than the latter are able to give; and the most rapid reader I have found is also the best at assimilating. I should further say that there is no relationship between rapidity of perception as thus tested and intellectual activity as tested by the general results of intellectual work; for I have tried the experiment with several highly distinguished men in science and literature, most of whom I found to be slow readers.”