ABSTRACT
Successive Comparison and the Time Errors. Since our trace hypothesis was largely based on the findings of Kohler and Lauenstein, it seems advisable to begin with their experimental work. It was started by a chance event. In the first volume of the "Psychologische Forschung" (1922) Borak published an article on the comparison of lifted weights in which he demonstrated and emphasized anew an effect which had been discovered long ago,t but whose real significance had fallen into oblivion. This effect had been called the negative time-error,' it consists in the fact that if two stim-
found to be smaller when the stronger stimulus succeeds the weaker than when it precedes it. This means that if the two stimuli A and B, B > A, are sufficiently similar to each other to make their difference recognizable in less than 100% of all presentations, then the sequence A B will produce a greater number of right judgments than the sequence B A. It also means, as Kohler pointed out later, that even when the judgments are correct in both cases, the first sequence seems to involve a much greater difference than the second (1. c., p. 163).
