The bearing of experimental psychology upon human skilled performance.

I am going to try to tell a story of interplay between ideas and experiments. The last 15 years have been a period of intense and concentrated activity for all psychologists working in the University of Cambridge. To those of us who have been closely identified with it, the whole development has assumed a character of exciting and engrossing adventure. I believe nobody, at the beginning, could possibly have foreseen to what precise issues our early, and very general, directing ideas would lead us. But as experiment has grown from experiment these ideas have become clarified and defined until we have now, so it seems to me and to many others, an approach and a technique in the controlled study of realistic human behaviour, which are of great significance in many fields, and certainly not least in the vast field of industrial medicine. The volume and detail of work completed have been very great. If we consider the activities of only one of the Cambridge Units, the Unit for Research in Applied Psychology, established by the Medical Research Council in 1944, we find that up to July of the present year 156 reports, the large majority of which are directly experimental in character, have been circulated. To these must be added a considerable number of published papers, all similarly of a basic experimental character, which were issued by the Nuffield Unit for Research in Ageing, established two years later. Generous support from the Rockefeller Trustees, from all three of the Fighting Services of this country, and from a number of industrial sources, has produced its full share to swell the stream of recorded research. All the time there has been a steady growth of contributions from members of the University staff and from research students who have come to us from many parts of the world. Since the bulk of this work is experimental, its detailed description has often taken a somewhat technical form. It would be unreasonable to expect any student or investigator, who has not himself been at the centre of operations, to be able, without great labour, to construct a clearly defined idea of what has already been achieved, and of the main growing points of present and future advance. The time appears to have come for an attempt to present a synthetic view of the whole of this research, and to try to do it in a manner sufficiently free from technicality to render it possible for any interested reader to understand, and, if it seems desirable, to make use of the fundamental ideas which have shaped its development. This, therefore, is what I shall now try to do, and if I adopt a somewhat personal style, it is only because that seems the best way to convey a little of the thrill and feeling that something yet more important may be waiting "just round the corner ", a feeling which all of us who have been actively concerned have had and still cherish.