An introduction to the experimental psychology of beauty / by C.W. Valentine.

  • Valentine, C. W. (Charles Wilfred), 1879-1964.
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An introduction to the experimental psychology of beauty / by C.W. Valentine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    come to test the colour preferences of very young children, we find that it is these more stimulating colours that are*preferred. Several careful experi- menters have concluded that infants of a year old, or even as young as seven months, already show a marked preference for red and yellow before other colours, and even before white, though infants are notoriously attracted by brightness. Some of these experiments were carried out as follows. Two coloured blocks of wood or pieces of paper would be placed at an equal distance from the child, and a record made as to which object he grasped at. The tendency to use the right (or left) hand more than the other was allowed for by presenting, say, the red first on the child’s right, with the blue on the left, and after- wards reversing the position of the coloured blocks. The present writer carried out a series of experiments by a new method, extending over five weeks, upon his little boy, at a considerably younger age, when he was only three and a half months old. A detailed description of the method, which requires many pre- cautions, has been published elsewhere, but the ex- periments may be shortly described here. The infant was placed comfortably among cushions, and two coloured wools were held by the writer about a foot and a half in front of him, and about one foot apart, against the dull grey background of the experi- menter’s coat. It was easy for me to see when the child gazed at either colour, and I called out the name of the colour looked at, or “ off”? when the child removed his gaze from it. The exact moments of these actions were recorded by an assistant with the aid of a watch indicating seconds, so that the length of time each colour was looked at could be calculated afterwards. When the two colours had been so held for two minutes, after an interval the position of the colours was reversed, and another