RETENTION OF TRACKING SKILLS.
Abstract
An effort was made to bring together the concept of the compatibility of display-control coding with 'population stereotypes' for coding and the concepts of the interference theory of forgetting as recently developed in the context of verbal learning and retention. This conjunction of concepts led to the prediction that tracking tasks that involve incompatible display-control relationships would be forgotten more rapidly than tracking tasks that involve display-control relationships compatible with population stereotypes. A preliminary study of the learning of a compensatory eye-hand pursuit task verified the expectation that performance with an incompatible display-control relationship would be poorer than performance with a compatible relationship, but the difference was not as great as was expected and seemed (with male Ss) to decline over practice trials. Therefore, all further work was done with an eye-hand pursuit tracking task. With this pursuit tracking task a preliminary experiment was accomplished in which a small number of Ss were given large amounts of practice with the compatible and incompatible display-control relationships and short ( 2 to 3 days) or long (10 to 40 days) intervals between practice days. Some data consistent with the hypothesis about differential forgetting were obtained in this study.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1964
- Accession Number
- AD0606236
Entities
People
- Arthur W. Melton
Organizations
- University of Michigan