The comments of the subjects are of especial value.  One subject (Mr. Dunlap) reports that he easily loses the sense of location of his fingers, and the spaces in between them seem to belong to him as much as do his fingers themselves.  When given one touch at a time and told to raise the finger touched he can do so readily, but he says he does not know which finger it is until he moves it.  He feels as if he willed to move the place touched without reference to the finger occupying it.  He sometimes hesitates in telling which finger it is, and sometimes he finds out when he moves a finger that it is not the one he thought it was.

Another subject (Dr. MacDougall) says that his fingers seem to him like a continuous surface, the same as the back of his hand.  He usually named the outside points first.  When asked about the order in which he named them, he said he named the most distinct ones first.  Once he reported that he felt six things, but that two of them were in the same places as two others, and hence he concluded there were but four.  This feeling in a less careful observer might lead to overestimation of number and be called diffusion, but all cases of overestimation cannot be explained that way, for it does not explain why certain combinations are so much more likely to lead to it than others.

In one subject (Mr. Swift) there was a marked tendency to locate points on the same fingers.  He made many mistakes about fingers B and C even when he reported the number correctly.  When B and D were touched at the same time he would often call it C and D, and when C and D were given immediately afterward he seemed to notice no difference.  With various combinations he would report C when B was given, although C had not been touched at the same time.  If B and C were touched at the same time he could perceive them well enough.

The next part of the research was an attempt to discover whether a person can perceive any difference between one point and two points which feel like one.  A simple little experiment was tried with the aesthesiometer.  The subjects did not know what was being used, and were asked to compare the relative size of two objects placed on the back of the hand in succession.  One of these objects was one knob of the aesthesiometer and the other was two knobs near enough together to lie within the threshold.  The distance of the points was varied from 10 to 15 mm.  Part of the time the one was given first and part of the time both were given together.  The one, whether given first or second, was always given about midway between the points touched by the two.  If the subject is not told to look for some specific difference he will not notice any difference between the two knobs and the one, and he will say they are alike; but if he is told to give particular attention to the size there seems to be a slight tendency to perceive a difference.  The subjects seem to feel very uncertain about their answers, and it looks very much like guess-work, but something caused the guesses to go more in one direction than in the other.