PRACTICE (from OF. practicer, pratiscr, practiquer, protiquer, Fr. pratiquer, to practice, from ML. practicare, praticare, to perform, from practice, business, fem. of Lat. practicus, from Gk. arpatcruc6s, praktikos, practical, from rpcio-o-etv, prassein, to do). In general, the ac quisition of a special skill or dexterity by fre quent performance of an action, or of a special experience by long familiarity with a subject. Psychologically regarded. it is a state of con sciousness (see ATTENTION) varying in degree with the amount of time and attention devoted to a problem, and characterized in its higher stages by a maximal concentration of attention (to gether with all the advantages for observation that this insures) and by a maximal capacity of reproduction (extent and accuracy of memory). It is thus the converse of fatigue (q.v.). "To practice is due a steady increase in delicacy of perception and readiness of judgment; to fatigue, a steady decrease in both" (Knipe). The deter mination of the stage of practice at which one is working is, therefore, of extreme importance in experimental psychology, especially in work of such fineness as, e.g. the comparison of short in tervals of time. (See DrnAnox.) Thorkelson, in an investigation of the 'time sense,' di4tin guishes no less than six degrees of practice, each of which has its characteristic difference linen. (See DISCRIMINATION, SENSIBLE.) Where an un practiced observer can discriminate differences of 1/10, an observer in the advancing stages of gen eral practice can cognize differences of 1/12 to 1/15; with complete general practice, differences of 1/15 to 1/18: with advancing special practice, differences of 1/18 to 1/20; with a higher degree of special practice, differences of 1/20 to 1,25; while maximal special practice still remains as the limiting term of the series.
The distinction here made between general and special practice is important. General practice implies a familiarity with problems or actions of the same class or kind as those in hand; thus.
any student who has worked in a psychological laboratory may be regarded as 'generally prac ticed' in experimental psychology, whereas on entering the laboratory he was wholly unprac ticed. So any one who has had piano lessons in childhood may be said to be 'generally practiced' in musical appreciation and rendition. General practice furthers accuracy of observation and power of judgment at large. It does not imply, as special practice does, a peculiar facility for work of a special kind. General practice will assist a man in a general way for work upon the time sense; but special practice must be acquired in the course of that work itself. In the same way. general practice in piano-playing does not assist one, in more than a general way, toward facility in rendering new compositions at sight; this facility must be gained by special practice with such compositions. Hence "general practice increases in direct proportion to special, but the reverse is not necessarily true." The characteristics which we have assigned to the practiced consciousness—maximal degree and constant direction of attention, delicacy of per ception, extent and accuracy of memory, confi dence of judgment—are evidently of a functional nature: they tell us nothing of the contents or structure of consciousness. Practice introduces no new contents. It has, however, the effect of narrowing consciousness. The practiced observer is able, by the very fact of practice, to hold him self exclusively to the practiced subject-matter, and to ignore distracting influences. In this re spect the structure of the practiced consciousness differs considerably from that of the unpracticed, whose attention is discursive and whose contents are more numerous and disconnected.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. WIMdt, PhySi0/008Ch e PsychoBibliography. WIMdt, PhySi0/008Ch e Psycho- logie (Leipzig, 1893) ; Kiilpe, Outlines of Psy chology, trans. (London. 1895) ; Titchener, Ex perimental Psychology (New York, 1901).