The psychology of economic work
must aim toward similar goals. We must secure a definite knowledge as
to the methods by which a group of movements can best be learned. We
must understand what value is to be attached to the repetitions and to
the pauses, to the imitations and to the special combinations of
movements, to the exercise in parts of the movements, to the rhythm of
the work, and to many similar influences which may shape the learning
process.
The simplest aspect, that of the mere repetition of the movement, has
frequently been examined by psychophysicists. The real founder of
experimental psychology, Fechner, showed the way; he performed
fatiguing experiments with lifted dumb-bells. Then came the time in
which the laboratories began to make a record of the muscular
activities with the help of the ergograph, an instrument with which
the movements of the arm and the fingers can easily be registered on
the smoked surface of a revolving drum. The subtlest variations of the
activity, the increase and decrease of the psychomotor impulse, the
mental fatigue, can be traced exactly in such graphic records. This
psychomotor side of the process, and not the mere muscle activity as
such, is indeed the essential factor which should interest us. The
results of exercise are a training of the central apparatus of the
brain and not of the muscular periphery. The further development of
those experiments soon led to complex questions, which referred not
only to the mere change in the motor efficiency, but to the learning
of particular groups of movements and to the influences on the
exactitude and reliability of the movements.
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