Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and MethodsHollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Science
Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and Methods
Hollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Psychophysiology
One of the least important of these factors is the variability of
individual performance. In the beginning of the experiment each individual
is more variable than at later points in the curve. This momentary
variability need not be supposed to affect all the tests in the same way
nor all individuals in the same direction. This fact may then tend somewhat
to reduce the correlation of the preliminary trials and may in some cases
materially affect the first five or ten trials. Beyond the twenty-fifth
trial the variability in these tests is much reduced, and particularly so
in the measures here used, which are in all cases, after the preliminary
trial, the medians of five successive trials.
Another factor that deserves mention is the possibility of change in the
character of the tests themselves, through practice with them. It is quite
probable, for example, that the opposites test comes, after many
repetitions, to resemble more and more that type of process or function
involved in color-naming. The responses become more and more intimately
associated with the stimulus words, the suggested responses to each word
become more and more limited in number and in most cases reduced to a
single word for each stimulus. This state of affairs is true of
color-naming at the very beginning of the experiment. As the order of the
stimulus words is changed at each trial, the test may come to involve more
and more the simple task of giving merely the quickest possible association
of the right response, and the overcoming of inhibitions and interferences
of a more or less general sort, with less and less emphasis on the element
of selection. Much the same may also be true of the addition test. It is
in these three tests that the increase in correlation is most marked, and
the actual coefficients highest at the end of the experiment. Careful
analysis of what takes place as one improves in these simple tests would no
doubt yield interesting material.
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