must appear that a person's ability to remember any facts depends
primarily, not upon the mere amount of memorizing he has done in the
past, but upon the extent to which his interests and old knowledge cause
him to attend to, understand, and associate the facts to be remembered.
There seems no justification, therefore, for the method of the teacher
who expected to strengthen the memories of her pupils for their school
work by having them walk quickly past the store windows and then attempt
to recall at school what they had seen. In such cases the boys are found
to remember certain objects, because their interests and knowledge
enable them to notice these more distinctly at the time of the
presentation. The girls, on the other hand, remember other objects,
because their interests and knowledge cause them to apprehend these
rather than the others.

APPERCEPTION

=Apperception a Law of Learning.=--In the study of the lesson process,
Chapter III, attention was called to the fact that the interpretation
which the mind places upon any presentation depends in large measure
upon the mind's present content and interest. It is an essential
characteristic of mind that it always attempts to give meaning to any
new impression, no matter how strange that impression may be. This end
is reached, however, only as the mind is able to apply to the
presentation certain elements of former experience. Even in earliest
infancy, impressions do not come to the organism as total strangers; for
the organism is already endowed with instinctive tendencies to react in
a definite manner to certain stimuli. As these reactions continue to
repeat themselves, however, permanent modifications, as previously
noted, are established in the nervous system, including both sensory and
motor adjustments. Since, moreover, these sensory and motor adjustments
give rise to ideas, they result in corresponding associations of mental
imagery. As these neural and mental elements are thus organized into
more and more complex masses, the recurrence of any element within an
associated mass is able to reinstate the other elements. The result is
that when a certain sensation is received, as, for instance, a sound
stimulus, it reinstates sensory impressions and motor reactions together
with their associated mental images, thus enabling the mind to assert
that a dog is barking in the distance. In such a case, the present
impression is evidently joined with, and interpreted