The Psychic Life of Micro-organisms: A Study in Experimental Psychology

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Open Court Publishing Company, 1889 - 120 Seiten
 

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Seite v - M. Romanes, in his zoological scale, assigns the first manifestations of surprise and fear to the larvae of insects and to the Annelids. We may reply upon this point, that there is not a single ciliate Infusory that cannot be frightened, and that does not manifest its fear by a rapid flight through the liquid of the preparation.
Seite 46 - Infusory guides itself while swimming about ; it avoids obstacles ; often it undertakes to force them aside ; its movements seem to be designed to effect an end, which in most instances is the search for food ; it approaches certain particles suspended in the liquid, it feels them with its cilia, it goes away and returns, all the while describing a zigzag course similar to the paths of captive fish in an aquarium ; this latter comparison naturally occurs to the mind. In short, the act of locomotion,...
Seite 54 - Paramecimn, which it is going to capture, it begins by casting at it a quantity of bacillary corpuscules which constitute its pharyngeal armature. The Paramecium immediately stops swimming and shows no other sign of vitality than feebly to beat the water with its vibratile cilia; on every side of it the darts lie scattered that were used to strike it. Its enemy then approaches and quickly thrusts forth from its mouth an organ shaped like a tongue, relatively long and resembling a transparent cylindrical...
Seite iii - Binet's researches and conclusions show, " that psychological phenomena begin among the very lowest classes of beings; they are met with in every form of life from the simplest cell to the most complicated organism.
Seite 61 - ... endowed with memory and volition," and possessed of " instinct of great precision ; " and he describes the following stages : — " (1) The perception of an external object ; " (2) The choice made between a number of objects ; " (3) The perception of their position in space ; " (4) Movements calculated either to approach the body and seize it, or to flee from it.
Seite 60 - Flagellate possessed of extraordinary audacity; it combines in troops to attack animalculse one hundred times as large as itself, as the Colpods, for instance, which are veritable giants when placed alongside of the Bodo. Like a horse attacked by a pack of wolves, the Colpod is soon rendered powerless; twenty, thirty, forty Bodos throw themselves upon him, eviscerate and devour him completely (Stein).
Seite 79 - It is known that the road it has to traverse is, in certain instances, extremely long. Thus, in the hen the oviduct measures 60 centimeters, and in large mammifers the passages have a length of from 25 to 30 centimeters. We might ask ourselves how such frail and minute creatures come by a power of locomotion great enough to enable them to traverse so long a path. But observation discloses the fact that they are able to overcome obstacles quite out of proportion to their size. Henle has seen spermatozoids...
Seite 48 - ... pursuit is not directed toward any one object more than another. They move rapidly hither and thither, changing their direction every moment, with the part of the body bearing the battery of trichocysts held in advance. When chance has brought them in contact with a victim, they let fly their darts 2 and crush it ; at this point of the action they go through certain manoeuvres that are prompted by a guiding will. It very seldom happens that the shattered victim remains motionless after direct...

Autoren-Profil (1889)

Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, is best known for his applied research on intelligence. He initially worked on pathological psychology, which was the major psychological specialty in France at the time, writing on such topics as hysteria. In 1891, however, he turned to experimental psychology and established it as a subdiscipline of psychology. In 1905, at Binet's suggestion, the Ministry of Education considered setting up special classes for mentally abnormal children. In order to determine which children would be unable to profit from normal instruction, Binet and Theodore Simon proposed a series of 30 intelligence tests. The tests were immediately successful and assured Binet's fame. Lewis M. Terman made a subsequent refinement of the tests. The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale is still in use today. Binet was one of the originators of the questionnaire method. He also studied the psychology of arithmetic prodigies and chess players and pioneered the study of small groups. Binet died in 1911.

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