This study examined the response latencies of 19 reticent kindergarten children, 19 peer controls, and their teachers during three "show and tell" sessions. Findings indicated that both groups of children took longer to respond to product questions than to choice questions or comments. Similarly, teachers waited longer for responses to…

In academic, scientific and professional communities, individuals request reprints of published articles from the authors of those articles. To investigate the effect of the method of communication, letter or postcard, with or without a personal handwritten note, on request compliance rate and response latency, two separate studies, in 1979 and in…

The present study explored a method of altering the reinforcing properties of the verbal event good in chronic, process, nonparanoid schizophrenics. When good was repeatedly paired with the termination of censure in the reaction time task, it became an effective reinforcer on a subsequent verbal conditioning task. (Author)

A study is reported in which the time it takes to access permanent memory and retrieve name-words for visual objects was measured by picture-naming reaction time. (Author/RM)

Benchmarking is one of several alternate methods of performance evaluation, which is a key aspect in the selection of database systems. The purpose of this report is to provide a performance evaluation methodology, or benchmarking framework, to assist in the design and implementation of a wide variety of benchmark experiments. The methodology,…

Earlier research (Thorson, et al., 1976) found that latencies increase for acoustically confusable letter pairs and decrease for visually confusable letter pairs as a positive function of interstimulus interval (ISI). To extend these findings to different age groups, 30 young adults (mean age, 21.4 years) and 30 older adults (mean age, 68.8 years)…

Although there are many variables that influence conformity, Bickman (1974) found that the apparel of the person making a request had a significant influence on conformity. To evaluate other factorswhicn may influence conformity (gender, age, status of the conforming subject, and altruism in conforming), 150 adult pedestrians (45% female, 71%…

A study examined the effect of variation in category dominance on retrieval latencies (and errors) from semantic memory. Subjects, 66 students enrolled in an introductory psychology course, were required to perform 6 successive retrievals from each of 18 conceptual categories. The six retrievals consisted of two successive blocks of three from…

Research on individual's response to emergency situations in the presence of others has produced conflicting results. The bystander effect is the label applied to inaction or the unlikelihood of assistance with others present. The social facilitation effect occurs when the presence of others energizes response; strong habit responses are…

Instructional time to high proficiency or response time to high proficiency performance can be viewed as linearly related to the effective complexity of the task/display combination which is the essence of instruction or of performance. This proposition is concretely illustrated for bar graph-using performance of 4th and 6th graders who under most…

A previous study (McCauley and Newman) found that there was less eye contact with strangers in the city than in the suburbs. The interpretation offered was that decreased eye contact in the city is an adaptation to overload of strangers. It is known from laboratory experiments that adaptation to interpersonal overload is relatively fast. Baum and…

A matching task was presented to 120 subjects from 6 to 20 years of age to investigate the relative influence of dimensional salience and salience of variability on problem solving. The task included four dimensions: form, color, number, and position. (LLK)

The ability of kindergarten, second and fourth grade children (N=90) to interpret meanings related to two categories of conversational implicature, bridges and flouts, was investigated. Bridges and flouts are types of indirect reply to a speaker's utterances that require a hearer to infer the reply's relevance to the preceeding conversation. Each…

Three experiments were undertaken to examine the processing limitations that underlie multiple task performance and, ultimately, to test the theory that there exists a time-sharing ability which is general and can be assessed through the simultaneous presentation of any two or more sufficiently demanding tasks. Subjects were males and/or females…