A Question of Imagery
DIAGNOSTIC TEACHING :Author: Helen R. Squier, B. S. Graduate Student, U. of P.
Gideon is a boy of eleven in the fourth grade. He was brought to the Psychological Clinic by his mother’s recommendation on account of his “nerves.” He displays a slight distractability of attention and a desire to “figit,” or toy with something with his hands a great deal, but these symptoms are no more serious in Gideon than they are in a large number of preadolescent boys.
In the course of his clinical examination, it was found that he had fourth-grade proficiency in reading, and that he enjoys reading such books as the “Arabian Nights” for his own amusement. He passed the ten-year reading and reproduction test with one memory to spare, so that he remembers fairly well what he reads. He is a trifle slow in his arithmetic, but he has a sufficiently good arithmetical sense to know when to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. He has not memorized all his addition and subtraction combinations, but he can get them fairly quickly, and he knows all his multiplication tables perfectly. He was a trifle slow with the performance of the “intelligence” tests in the laboratory, and he failed in his first performance with the Witmer Cylinder Test. But it is probable that he would have been classed as a normal, somewhat stupid and somewhat nervous boy, had it not been for his performance with the Design Blocks. This fell so far below his other performances and was so very unlike the performance one might be led to expect from a boy of Gideon’s type that it raised an interesting question in the mind of the examiner in regard to his mental imagery. How had Gideon learned to read with fourth-grade proficiency, when he had such serious trouble with such a simple problem as the making of a design from four design blocks? It was to find the answer to this question, that the examiner recommended George for clinic teaching and the resultant analytical diagnosis.
It became my business, as clinic teacher, to make a special study of Gideon’s performance with the design blocks in particular and of his mental imagery in general.
The first time Gideon worked with the design blocks, he was shown the model of a single chevron and asked to copy it. He worked for two minutes and forty-five seconds and finally stopped with it all wrong. At last lie got it half right and then asked the examiner if it was all right. When he was told to look and see, he at once set to work again and finally got the chevron design. But when his blocks were disarranged and he was told to try again, he was no more successful, and his performance was no better than in his first trial. He was made to copy the chevron three times, but even then he could not reproduce it from memory.
It was just a month after this that I began the task of systematically trying to teach Gideon to make the chevron design out of four blocks from memory. I reminded him of his work with the design blocks and the chevron, and called his attention to the fact that the chevron is just exactly like the wound and service stripes the boys wear on their sleeves when they come back from Europe. He seemed to understand the instructions well and set to work with the four blocks I gave him. The result, which he held up proudly for inspection, was a yellow square in a blue background with one angle of the square pointing toward him. When I asked him if that was right, he set to work again, but this time he did not even succeed in getting a yellow figure. When he stopped working, apparently satisfied with his performance, the top two blocks presented a yellow triangle bounded by blue and the two lower blocks a blue triangle bounded by yellow. He tried many different arrangements but could not seem to hit upon the chevron. He was allowed, finally, to copy a model, which he succeeded in doing after a great deal of trial and error. But he still could not reproduce the chevron from memory. I asked him to draw a picture of the design for me, and he readily drew an angle of about forty-five degrees, in double lines, with legs about the length of the sides of the chevron formed by the design blocks. With this drawing before him, he was finally able to form the chevron out of the blocks.
And now one point at least was established: He did have a sufficiently clear visual image of the chevron to carry it over to his kinesthetic sense and thereby to represent the size and shape of the chevron, roughly at least, with paper and pencil. It might be that his visual image was strong enough to serve as a guide for him, provided there was no conflicting picture before him, and not sufficiently strong to stand out when the design blocks were in other and possibly distracting designs before him. But I could not be sure of this point until I had investigated further.
I gave him a double chevron composed of eight blocks to copy from a model of eight blocks just like his. It was when he showed himself absolutely at a loss here that I began to divine to a small extent what his trouble was. He was working with the image of the whole figure in his mind and had not displayed enough contracted particularization to analyze the figure into the component parts. He went on putting block after block into his design in incorrect positions because he did not match his work with the model, block for block. His idea was simply to go on working and moving the blocks about until he hit upon the figure of the model?a plan which had some chance of success as long as he had only four blocks to work with, but which was hopelessly impracticable when the number of his blocks was increased to eight.
It was evident that he needed training in method. So I showed him a simple design of sixteen blocks on the lid of the box, calling his attention especially to the fact that he must be very careful to match each of the blocks that composed the figure with one of his blocks. I insisted upon his having each block in the correct position before he went on to the next one, and I saw that he was learning to analyze his figure. He succeeded in putting the second eight blocks away in about half the time it took him to put away the first eight, with about half as many mismoves.
And now another point was established: A part of his difficulty lay in his lack of familiarity with his tools. He had not gone to kindergarten, and, if his own statement is correct, he has no toys of any kind at home. This, however, could not account for the major part of his difficulty. Surely a boy of eleven should be able to learn the secrets of four simple design blocks at one short sitting. The next week Gideon was still unable to put together the single chevron from memory, though he could draw it again before he had been allowed to see it and put it together with his model before him. Now he was really interested in the problem for its own sake, and, after he had painfully and with much detailed instruction and correction fashioned the double chevron from a model, he was anxious to go on making chevrons. So I suggested that he copy the third chevron from the first, and he finally managed to do this, though he would continually stop with the design incorrect and ask me if it was right. I always told him to look and see, but he never stopped asking me. Now he was beginning to form a zigzag yellow path in a sea of blue. Many times he made wrong moves which he could not seem to correct with his eyes. But at every critical turn in the figure, he stopped to trace the yellow path with his finger, seeming to get a significance in the regular turns and angles of the figure with his finger kinesthesia that he could not get with his eyes.
This suggested to my mind at least two points in a working hypothesis, if not two points in my conclusion. His kinesthetic sensations, images, and memories, were better than his visual ones. And yet it might be that a large part of his trouble lay in the kinesthesia of the muscles of his eyes. He could get simple color sensations, but it was the angles and turns of the chevron figure that troubled him most. His most frequent mistake in the formation of the figure and the mistake which he invariably made the first time I asked him to form the chevron each day was the formation of the yellow square in a blue background instead of the chevron figure. He turned the wrong side of his yellow triangles on his two lower blocks to meet the yellow of the upper blocks. Yet very frequently, after this mistake had been pointed out, he placed a blue side of one of his lower blocks against the yellow of the upper block. This was an error in color as well as in position.
Now I decided that I could not establish this point without a knowledge of his imagery in general. So far as the chevron performance was concerned, three or four possible hypotheses, in addition to the one mentioned above, entered my mind: 1. He might be suffering from a visual amnesia, which manifested itself particularly in connection with the chevron, because so much stress had been laid upon that figure. He might be exhibiting stage fright.
2. There might be a lack in his visual kinesis. It might be impossible for his eyes to initiate movements.
3. It might be (a) that he was unable to hold a sustained visual image, or (b) that he was unable to coordinate images from different sense realms or form complex images from his simple ones.
4. It might be that he had such a clear and distinct image of the chevron as a whole that he was unable to break it up into its component parts?he might have too strong a visual image.
My first investigation of his imagery was with the memory span experiment. With the auditory presentation the clinical examiner had found that he was able to reproduce five digits, but that it seemed impossible for him to get six. With the series 284739, he left out the 8 on four successive repetitions. Then he got all the digits, including the 8, but said the 8 out of place. Again he got all the digits but not in their right order. Then he got the other digits all right, omitting 8. I felt that this particular difficulty with the 8 might or might not be significant.
In my own investigation of his memory span, I found that he had, with the auditory presentation, a memory span of five and that he could get six digits on two repetitions. But he could not get seven digits on ten repetitions. With the combined visual and vocal presentation?when he read the numbers aloud from a card which I held before his eyes?he failed to give the five digits of the first stimulus number until the second repetition, but he succeeded in giving the five digits on the first presentation of the second stimulus number. This was barely a memory span of five, when he had shown an unquestionable five with the auditory presentation. The strange part of this performance was that he gave five easily with the visual presentation when he did not read the numbers aloud. I noticed that his lips moved as he read the digits, but he made no sound. He was able to reproduce not only five digits but six with the visual presentation. His method, however, made it possible for him to do this by using a span of only four. The stimulus series was 628195, which he reproduced as “six, twenty-eight, one, ninetyfive.” By this grouping, which he hit upon quite without assistance, he was able to reproduce as many as eight digits on two repetitions, complicating his problem and learning one more than his real span of five in two repetitions. Here the series to be reproduced was 83157294. which he gave as “eight, three, one, five, seventy-two, ninety-four.”
His performance with the Binet language tests showed no lack of simple verbal imagery. He acquitted himself well in the nineyear rhyming test, and his ten-year “60-word” free association test displayed nothing unusual. He started out by naming the objects in the room, got outside the room on some legitimate association and showed natural and good classification in his method of naming all the animals he could think of together and of naming common fruits and vegetables in groups. He passed the test easily and never seemed to have to stop for a word. In spite of this wealth of language, however, he was unable to pass the twelve-year dissected sentences tests or to succeed with them at all. I was not trying to get his I. Q., so that I could take the liberty of varying the procedure of the tests as I pleased. I let him have a pencil for the dissected sentences, and he proceeded with the test very systematically by crossing out each word in the first sentence as he used it in the sentence he was forming. He worked for a full minute on the first sentence, but all he could make of it was, “for We start early at the hour.” His second sentence read,”My teacher asked to correct my paper I.” He professed an inability to do the third.
He enjoyed working with the Healy Completion Test, but was not especially good at it. He put the bird in the place of the little girl’s hat, and put the hat above the bird cage. He changed this when I questioned him about it and put the basket of apples above the bird cage. When I asked him what the boy in the tree was doing, eh answered, “Dropping apples into the basket.” When I suggested that that was impossible when the basket was higher up than the boy, he put the basket in the correct position.
He succeeded in making an acceptable copy of the diamond in the VH-year Binet tests, making his copy somewhat larger than the original. He fell short of passing the 10-year design copying test, however, getting only half a credit for each design. He drew lines to only three corners in Design B, drew one line from the corner of the inner oblong to the side of the outer one and put in one extra line from the side of the inner oblong to the side of the outer one. He left out the center portion of Design A, and extended both of the upper square formations of this design in the same direction. This performance with Design A especially suggested a possible difficulty with direction in his visual perception?a suggestion which was materially strengthened by his performance with the Knox Diagonal and Triangle tests. About one-third of his attempts to fit pieces into these tests resulted in a confusion of the direction of the angles, as though he had a kind of mirror perception. In the diagonal he was always able to correct this at suggestion, but in the triangle it was this tendency more than anything else that caused him to become hopelessly confused and finally to give up the test altogether. His planfulness in the test, however, accounted in part for his failure. He succeeded in forming the rectangle correctly and then dumped the triangles forming the rectangle out on the table again when he had difficulty with the triangle.
His lack of planfulness came out in connection with the Binet Ball and Field Test, when his demonstration of a path for finding the ball would have been classed as an eight-year level inferior plan at best. It was well substantiated by his performance with Healy A. The first time he saw this test he was able to solve it in three minutes and twenty seconds which time he subsequently reduced to twenty seconds in two additional performances. When he was shown the test about two weeks later he failed to solve it without instruction, He succeeded in getting the longest piece in place and then placed the next longest parallel and in juxtaposition to this first piece, with the result that he had a small empty space at the end of this second block that none of his pieces could fill. He went right on trying to force the other pieces into place, with the result that he could accomplish nothing. He struggled with the thing for a while, and then I told him that every bit of space would have to be filled and that when he found that a piece did not fit as he had it first, he should try it at right angles to the original position. He carried out this suggestion and was able to give a much improved performance. That he is easily confused in his imagery is shown by his answers to the first of the Binet Problems of Fact. He saw a man hanging from the tree in the park, but when I asked him how the man got there, he answered that he was killed by a bear. When I asked him how he could be killed by a bear if he was hanging from a tree, he said, “No, a monkey.”
“You mean that the monkey was hanging from the tree, or that the man was killed by the monkey?” I asked. “The man was killed by the monkey,” he answered. In answer to the question concerning the man “walking sitting down,” he said first that the man was riding a horse. When I suggested that the man would not be walking if he was riding a horse, he was at a loss. I moved my feet up and down in the suggested manner, to see if that would arouse an image in his mind, but that evidently suggested nothing to him. But when he obeyed my suggestion to move his own feet up and down as if he were walking, he answered, “Oh, a bicycle!”
One of the most peculiar aspects of the whole investigation of this case is the fact that the boy could not give six digits on any number of repetitions, apparently, in his examination, and yet could give six on the second repetition, and apparently use this ability to good advantage a month later. The fact that his difficulty with the reproduction of six digits the first time he was tested centered consistently around one particular digit can, in view of his later performances, have only one explanation. There was some actual counter-suggestion at work here. He had gotten the idea into his head that he could not get the digit eight, and so he was never able to get that digit. The fact that 8 was the second digit in the series makes it very unlikely that it was the most natural number for him to forget because of its position in the series. Children are much more likely to have difficulty with one of the later numbers than with one of the first numbers.
His difficulty with the reproduction of five digits with the vocovisual presentation can be very easily explained by a defect in his distribution of attention. He was trying to get a visual image of the numbers, to read them correctly and to remember them all at once, and it was impossible for him to distribute his attention successfully over all these things at once. The image was just a little too complex when all of it was called definitely to his attention. He was able to make the transfer from the visual image to the vocomotor image when he did not read aloud, because this transfer was habitual and automatic and did not require his attention. The fact that he moved his lips constantly suggests that his image of the number before he reproduced it was voco-motor rather than visual. Each number was in the visual field just long enough for him to get a sufficiently clear perception of it to form a voco-motor image. His visual image pure and simple, therefore, was not tested here. His performance with the Binet Design A, and with the Knox tests made me feel sure that at least a part of his trouble lay in the kinesthesia of his eye muscles?despite the fact that his ability to draw the chevron which he could not reproduce with the blocks? and in a suggestion of mirror perception. This last hypothesis is supported by an incident in connection with the chevron figure itself.
On the second day of my work with him, he had evidently learned to place the two upper blocks together correctly, but invariably he formed them upside down and then reversed their position. He could not reproduce the two lower blocks from memory. He had two images in his mind therefore: the image of the two top chevrons, inverted, and the image of the complete figure. He could get this last image only by an imperfectly applied trial and error method, and the images on the blocks before him could sometimes confuse his memorial image of the appearance of the figure. On the third day of my work with him, he produced, when he tried the chevron, two yellow triangles one of which he placed on the top of the other. He had been able to carry over for a week the image of the apex of the chevron, and when he had tried to recall the image of the two lower blocks, the first image had simply been repeated. It was only when his drawing of the chevron or an actual-chevron was before him, that he could keep in mind the definite direction of the yellow path formed by the chevron. Without either of these two aids, he turned the block over and around in a haphazard, lost fashion, until I reminded him that the only way to succeed was to keep turning the block one side at a time in the same direction until he produced the desired figure. He was able to do this easily with the fourth block, but he had most difficulty with the third, because a threequarter image of the chevron had not stayed in his mind, and he could not analyze his complete image sufficiently well to know how one leg of the chevron should look before the other was formed. Later in the day, it was evident that he was proceeding about the problem with a change in his imagery. When I asked him to put the chevron together, he placed the two top blocks together correctly and then joined the two lower blocks and fitted them to the top blocks in such a way that the blue of each of his lower blocks touched the yellow of^his’upper blocks. Then I understood what had been troublingJiim for sometime. He had an inverted perception of the two lower blocks just as he had had an inverted perception of the two upper blocks for awhile. I recalled the way in which he had fitted blue to yellow the first day I worked with him, and discovered that this was not a confusion in regard to color or form, but rather an inverted image, which I had managed to rid him of, without putting any other image in its place.
And now, at last, I felt that I knew something of his imagery in general and his difficulty with the chevron design in particular: 1. He was handicapped by his lack of familiarity with the material with which he was required to work.
2. His visual images were frequently inverted, and he suffered from weak kinesthesia of the muscles of the eye, with the result that he could not be sure of his angles in such a figure as the chevron, and his visual image of such a figure was necessarily blurred. 3. This weakness of his kinesthesia was confined to the muscles of the eyes alone. His general kinesthetic imagery was good, as was evidenced by the fact that he could find errors in the chevron figure by tracing the lines of the figure with his fingers and by the fact that his kinesthetic imagery gave him the solution to the Binet question of the “man who walks sitting down.” He was able to draw the chevron when he could not form it with the blocks with the help of this strong kinesthesia. 4. His distribution of attention and his contracted particularization are defective, though these may be improved with maturity and training. He is unable to analyze a whole into its component parts, and he is unable to synthetize a number of parts into a complete whole. 5. His planfulness is defective. His simple images may be quite clear, but he is frequently unable to shape them into meaningful complex figures and to proceed definitely by their guidance to the solution of a problem.
6. He is somewhat suggestible, so that it is possible to increase the difficulty of a task for him by making him believe that he cannot succeed in it.
It was all of these defects together, rather than any particular one, which made the formation of the chevron difficult for Gideon. Even with his inverted images, he would have been able to succeed with the test had he had the power of analyzing the situation, or of formulating a good plan by which to solve the problem. He would probably have been able to work with a higher competency had he not had the feeling that that particular task was difficult for him, and so diverted his own attention.
He will never be able to distinguish himself in the world, but it is probable that, with a careful training of his methods of thinking and his planfulness, he will be able to hold his own among his fellows and to be self-supporting. His ambition at present is to become a wagon driver or a deliveryman, and there is no reason why he should not make a good one, since this occupation does not require work with mechanical tools of any kind or intellectual ability of a very high order. He has enough judgment and common sense to get along in the world.
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