remarkable regression for objects in passing from the lowest to the next grade
above.
In the accuracy of reproducing the order of impressions, girls much exceeded
boys at all ages. For seen object, their accuracy was twice that of boys, the boys
excelling in order only in number. In general, ability to reproduce a series of
impressions increases and decreases with the power to reproduce in any order,
but by no means in direct proportion to it. The effect of the last member in a
series by a purely mechanical reproduction is best in boys. The range and energy
of reproduction is far higher than ordered sequence. In general girls slightly
exceed boys in recalling numbers, touch concepts, and sounds, and largely
exceed in recalling feeling concepts, real things and visual concept.
Colegrove[29] tabulated returns from the early memories of 1,658
correspondents with 6,069 memories, from which he reached the conclusions,
represented in the following curves, for the earliest three memories of white
males and females.
In the cuts on the following page, the heavy line represents the first memory, the
broken the second, and the dotted the third. Age at the time of reporting is
represented in distance to the right, and the age of the person at the time of the
occurrence remembered is represented by the distance upward. "There is a rise in
all the curves at adolescence. This shows that, from the age of twelve to fifteen,
boys do not recall so early memories as they do both before and after this
period." This Colegrove ascribes to the fact that the present seems so large and
rich. At any rate, "the earliest memories of boys at the age of fourteen average
almost four years." His curves for girls show that the age of all the first three
memories which they are able to recall is higher at fourteen than at any period
before or after; that at seven and eight the average age of the first things recalled
is nearly a year earlier than it is at fourteen. This means that at puberty there is a
marked and characteristic obliteration of infantile memories which lapse to
oblivion with augmented absorption in the present.
[Illustration: Untitled Graph.]
It was found that males have the greatest number of memories for protracted or
repeated occurrences, for people, and clothing, topographical and logical
matters; that females have better memories for novel occurrences or single
impressions. Already at ten and eleven motor memories begin to decrease for