 With James's supervision, Stein and another student, Leon Mendez Solomons, performed experiments on "normal motor automatism", a phenomenon hypothesized to occur in people when their attention is divided between two simultaneous intelligent activities such as writing and speaking.These experiments yielded examples of writing that appeared to represent "stream of consciousness", a psychological theory often attributed to James and the style of modernist authors Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.In 1934, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner interpreted Stein's difficult poem "Tender Buttons" as an example of "normal motor automatism".