INTRODUCTION

Not only stories, descriptions of events and arguments, but various types of picture material—art forms, decorative patterns, graphic representations of common objects and the like—frequently pass rapidly from person to person and from group to group. In the course of this transmission the material often suffers considerable change. It is therefore interesting, both from the point of view of the remembering of picture material and from that of its bearing upon the development of conventional representations, to see how far such a course of change can be experimentally produced. It is well known that a person may perfectly remember what he cannot reproduce well by drawing. But it has constantly appeared that when any complex form is presented for visual observation certain features of it will be dominant. These are pretty sure to appear again in any reproduction that may be effected; and, whether they are depicted accurately or not, it seems probable that it is these which set the direction of change in the course of serial reproduction.

Accordingly I collected a number of very simple picture representations and submitted them to a course of repeated and serial reproduction under exactly the same conditions as have been described for the prose passages. As before, I shall give here only a very small selection of the many results that have been collected. This selection will sufficiently illustrate a few of the outstanding characteristics of the reproductions. The principles are found to be broadly the same, both in repeated and in serial reproduction. I shall therefore draw my illustrations from the chains of reproduction only.