Prediction and diagnosis: An experimental comparison

Diagnostic tasks differ from predictive tasks in two respects (1) the direction of the inference in diagnosis (from effect to cause) is inverse to that in prediction (from cause to effect), and (2) the event to be inferred is more distal in diagnostic tasks than in predictive tasks. These task features led to the hypothesis that a diagnostic task would be harder to learn than a predictive task. This hypothesis was tested in an experimental situation in which the causal mechanism was random sampling with replacement. Five groups of subjects with 10 subjects in each (two predictive and three diagnostic groups) were run in individual sessions with 100 trials of feedback training. The two predictive groups learned more rapidly and to a higher level compared to the diagnostic groups. Conclusion: the present data support the hypothesis that predictive tasks are easier to learn than comparable diagnostic tasks.     

The Prediction of Mothers' Behavior with their Hyperactive Children during Play and Task Situations

Forty mothers were observed interacting with their hyperactive children during a play and structured task situation. Relationships between observed child behavior, maternal self-ratings of self-esteem and stress and mothers' behavior in these situations were examined. The amounts of interaction, control and nonresponding exhibited by mothers during play and task situations were significantly correlated with both their children's behavior and their reported self-esteem and stress associated with the parental role. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the behavior of the child predicted maternal behavior for both the play and structured task situations. However, mothers' reports of stress and self-esteem were significant predictors of their behavior only for the structured task situation. These preliminary findings suggest that maternal cognitions and affects may be more highly correlated with their interactional behavior for some situations versus others. Such information could be useful for the development of situation-specific treatment goals when working with mothers of disturbed children.     

Development of a Career Task Self-Efficacy Scale: The Kuder Task Self-Efficacy Scale

The present study consisted of developing the Kuder Task Self-Efficacy Scale (KTSES). The KTSES is a 30-item scale measuring a person's self-efficacy for tasks corresponding to Kuder's 10 occupational interest areas (Kuder Zytowski, 1991). Responses from the KTSES were compared with responses to the Self-Esteem Inventory (SES; Rosenberg, 1965) and the Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale (CDMSE; Taylor Betz, 1983) to see if career task self-efficacy was related to self-esteem and career decision-making self-efficacy. Answers to the KTSES were also compared with responses given for occupations corresponding to the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS; Kuder Zytowski, 1991) to see if occupational self-efficacy was related to career task self-efficacy. Results supported the validity and reliability of the KTSES. The utility of having a task self-efficacy scale to go with the KOIS is discussed, and ideas for future research are given.     

Task switching: a PDP model

When subjects switch between a pair of stimulus-response tasks, reaction time is slower on trial N if a different task was performed on trial N - 1. We present a parallel distributed processing (PDP) model that simulates this effect when subjects switch between word reading and color naming in response to Stroop stimuli. Reaction time on "switch trials" can be slowed by an extended response selection process which results from (a) persisting, inappropriate states of activation and inhibition of task-controlling representations; and (b) associative learning, which allows stimuli to evoke tasks sets with which they have recently been associated (as proposed by Allport & Wylie, 2000). The model provides a good fit to a large body of empirical data, including findings which have been seen as problematic for this explanation of switch costs, and shows similar behavior when the parameters are set to random values, supporting Allport and Wylie's proposal.     

Alienated Youth: the Counselor's Task

A serious problem facing counselors in today's schools is the increasing number of youth who are alienated from their schools. In dealing with this situation, counselors frequently regard it as one which stems from a dysfunction within the individual student; although this may be true in some cases, it is the thesis of this article that the problem often stems from the structure of the school. The theoretical background and causes of alienation in today's youth are discussed. Implications for counselors and the schools are presented along with recommendations for possible courses of action.     

Task novelty and intelligence

Psychology students were presented with a mental puzzle based on knowledge of geometry, with several versions of Wason's selection task, and with some tasks of essay writing. Test scores were obtained on a sentence completion test and a test of spatial configuration. With the different problem-solving tasks, a relationship between success and intellectual ability was observed only in cases where the data indicated that the subjects were familiar with the task in question. The results support the theory previously set forth by Raaheim; that only in situations where the degree of novelty is moderate, will the intelligent use of past experience prove beneficial to problem solving.     

Task grammar and attitude

This paper investigates the ability of perceivers to form impressions of tasks as part of the process of forming a task attitude. This ability is described as being partly given by a syntactic grammar that specifies both the primitive elements of tasks and the rules that structure these elements to form meaningful task impressions. The proposed grammar is shown to generate representations of task structure that can be mapped readily onto task attitudes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of task grammar for research on task attitudes.     

Creativity in Physics: Response Fluency and Task Specificity

The purpose of this study was to explore creativity in the domain of physics and, specifically, its relation to fluency of responses (divergent thinking) and type of task. Fifty-four university students were pretested on their knowledge of relevant physics concepts. They then were asked to solve 3 ill-defined problems representing different types of tasks. The appropriate responses given to each problem were evaluated as to their number (fluency) and frequency (originality). Task-specific components were found to influence creativity independently and to moderate the effects of general factors such as fluency of responses. Efforts to predict and facilitate creativity in educational settings, therefore, also must take into account the way creativity is manifested within particular domains and the constraints that different types of tasks may impose.     

The Corsi Block-Tapping Task: Methodological and Theoretical Considerations

The Corsi block-tapping task has enjoyed extensive use in clinical and experimental studies for a quarter of a century and is arguably the single most important nonverbal task in neuropsychological research. Nevertheless, there has been considerable inconsistency not only in the administration and scoring of this measure, but also in the physical properties of the test apparatus. In this paper, we survey a wide range of studies that have made use of the block-tapping task during the past 25 years and provide a detailed appraisal of the manifold methodological variations. Additionally, we discuss the historical context in which the Corsi originated and offer a critical examination of the cognitive processing operations purported to underlie performance on this task.     

Discussion Task Demands and Revising Probabilities in the Selection Task: A Comment on Green,Over, and Pyne

Green, Over, and Pyne's (1997) paper (hereafter referred to as “GOP”) seems to provide a novel approach to examining probabilistic effects in Wason's selection task. However, in this comment, it is argued that their chosen experimental paradigm confounds most of their results. The task demands of the externalisation procedure (Green, 1995) enforce a correlation between card selections and the probability of finding a counterexample, which was the main finding of GOP's experiments. Consequently GOP cannot argue that their data support Kirby's (1994) proposal that people's normal strategy in the selection task is to seek falsifying evidence. Despite this methodological problem, effects of the probability of the antecedent (p) of a conditional rule, if p then q, predicted by Kirby (1994) and by Oaksford and Chater (1994) were observed, although they were inconsistent between Experiments 1 and 2. Moreover, the probability estimates that GOP collected, which are not vulnerable to that methodological criticism, do support the idea that when P (p)> P (q), participants revise P (p) down as suggested by Oaksford and Chater (1994).     

Subjective Estimation of Task Time and Task Difficulty of Simple Movement Tasks

It has been demonstrated in previous work that the same neural structures are used for both imagined and real movements. To provide a strong test of the similarity of imagined and actual movement times, 4 simple movement tasks were used to determine the relationship between estimated task time and actual movement time. The tasks were single-component visually controlled movements, 2-component visually controlled, low index of difficulty (ID) moves and pin-to-hole transfer movements. For each task there was good correspondence between the mean estimated times and actual movement times. In all cases, the same factors determined the actual and estimated movement times: the amplitudes of movement and the IDs of the component movements, however the contribution of each of these variables differed for the imagined and real tasks. Generally, the standard deviations of the estimated times were linearly related to the estimated time values. Overall, the data provide strong evidence for the same neural structures being used for both imagined and actual movements.     

Joint Relationships of Task Proficiency With Aptitude,Experience, and Task Difficulty: A Cross-Level,Interactional Study

We adopted a cross-level interactional perspective in investigating the prediction of United States Air Force (USAF) jet engine mechanic task-level proficiency from aptitude, experience, and task difficulty. Aptitude, job and task experience, and task difficulty measures all were significant predictors of task proficiency. An hypothesis that task difficulty would moderate the aptitude-task proficiency relationship received no support. Similarly, hypothesized moderating effects of job experience on relationships of task proficiency with aptitude and task difficulty received little support. lhsk-level experience, however, had significant moderating effects on relationships of task proficiency with both aptitude and task difficulty. Aptitude and task difficulty had weaker relationships with task proficiency with increased task experience. We recommend that future research on performance determinants (a) clarify further the experience construct and (b) exploit theoretical and analytic advantages of cross-level and multilevel research designs.     

Task Enjoyment: A Mediator Between Achievement Motives and Performance

Task enjoyment is an important component in social cognitive theories of achievement motivation and intrinsic motivation. Combining these theories with the classic achievement-motivation theory we predicted that task enjoyment and its facilitating behavioral manifestations are associated with an approach-oriented achievement motive and only when individuals anticipate forthcoming competence feedback. In the present study we regarded task enjoyment as a mediator between the achievement motive and performance. First, a two-way ANOVA design was adopted. Success-motivated individuals performed better in a reaction task than failure-motivated individuals, and they reported more task enjoyment during performance. This relationship was not dependent on whether competence information had been announced or not. Second, path analyses showed as expected that the relationship between achievement motivation and performance was mediated by task enjoyment. This mediation was observed only under the condition that individuals expected competence feedback. These results were discussed considering current theories of achievement motivation and intrinsic motivation. It is shown that the findings enrich the related nomological networks in some important ways.     

重要而迫切的课题:卫生技术评估

卫生技术评估,是指对卫生技术的特性、临床和预防的安全有效性、经济耗费的可持续性,以及社会伦理法律的适应性进行全面系统的评价,为医学科学和管理工作者提供信息和决策依据,对卫生技术的开发、应用、推广与淘汰进行合理的政策干预.     

Task interdependence and job design: test of a theory

This paper develops the concept of task interdependence and integrates it in the Hackman and Oldham (1976) theory of job design. Two dimensions of initiated task interdependence and received task interdependence are developed as multidimensional concepts, each being made up of the elements of scope, resources, and criticality. A distinction is made between the two psychological states of experienced responsibility for one's own work and personal outcomes, and experienced responsibility for others' (dependents') work and personal outcomes for whom one initiates task interdependence. Autonomy is hypothesized to be related only to experienced responsibility for one's own work outcomes while initiated task interdependence is related to experienced responsibility for others' work outcomes. Initiated interdependence is also hypothesized to be positively related to the affective positive work and personal outcomes, while received task interdependence is negatively related to these variables. New subscales for the measurements of these constructs are developed and reliability and validity coefficients are reported. The substantive results give support to the motivating potential of initiated task interdependence. However, the results do not support the hypotheses associated with received task interdependence.