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…

In a study of individual differences in long-term memory access, university undergraduates verified (1) whether an item was a member of a category; (2) whether two items belonged in the same category; and (3) whether two words had the same name. Reaction times from these tasks were correlated with verbal ability, as measured by performance on a…

A major contribution of information-processing theory to the psychology of remembering is the concept of memory or information retrieval. Several theories of the fact retrieval processes of the human memory, which constitute a substrate for any cognitive ability requiring stored information, have drawn heavily on certain data processing…

The feasibility of completely automating the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was tested, and item response latencies were compared with other MMPI item characteristics. A total of 26 scales were successfully scored automatically for 165 subjects. The program also typed a Mayo Clinic interpretive report on a computer terminal,…

A system for classifying perceptual-motor tasks was devised for the purpose of distinguishing the kinds of training strategy appropriate for each task. A rationale is presented and various task elements are delineated in terms of cue functions, image or mediational functions, and movement tendency. The defined task elements were used in…

Presented are the proceedings of the Mississippi Perceptual-Motor Symposium, April 20-21, 1973. Included are papers on motor development, models for perceptual motor programming, children with minimal brain damage, effects of learning games or academic abilities, research on perceptual motor measures, and programs for motor development. (JB)

To replicate and extend the results of a previous study, this project investigated the effects of behavioral objectives and/or rules on computer-based learning task performance. The 133 subjects were randomly assigned to an example-only, objective-example, rule example, or objective-rule example group. The availability of rules and/or objectives…

Two groups of five preschool children were trained to press a key for marbles for four sessions of variable ratio reinforcement (VR6). Subsequently, response decrement for the groups was compared during conditions of fixed and variable differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO and VDRO). Fixed DRO was more effective for decreasing response…

The present study, by requiring subjects to decide whether the two words in a stimulus pair have the same or different meanings, is an attempt to measure the time necessary to encode a printed word into a representation of its meaning which is available for subsequent matching. (Author)