As
usual, here, too, I began with rather complicated material and only
slowly did I simplify the apparatus until it finally took an entirely
inconspicuous form. But this is surely the most desirable outcome for
testing methods which are to be applied to large numbers of persons.
Complicated instruments, for the handling of which special training is
needed, are never so useful for practical purposes as the simple
schemes which can be easily applied. The form of which I finally made
use is the following. I work with 24 cards of the size of
playing-cards. On the upper half of every one of these cards we have 4
rows of 12 capital letters, namely, A, E, O, and U in irregular
repetition. On 4 cards, one of these vowels appears 21 times and each
of the three others 9 times; on 8 cards, one appears 18 times and
every one of the three others 10 times; on 8 cards, one appears 15
times and each of the others 11 times; and finally, on 4 cards one
vowel appears 16 times, each of the three others 8 times, and besides
them 8 different consonants are mixed in. The person to be tested has
to distribute these 24 cards as quickly as possible in 4 piles, in
such a way that in the first pile are placed all cards in which the
letter A is most frequent, in the second those in which the letter E
predominates, and so on. As a matter of course the result must never
be secured by counting the letters. Any attempt to act against this
prescription and secretly to begin counting would moreover delay the
decision so long that the final result would be an unsatisfactory
achievement anyhow.
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