Bemerkungen,veranlaßt durch eine von W. Wolff aufgestellte Kontrastbedingung

Ohne Zusammenfassung Mit 1 Textabbildung.     

The Beginnings of Expertise for Ballads

To study the beginning stages of expertise, 14 students, who were inexperienced with ballads, heard and recalled a series of 5 ballads over the course of 5 weeks. Compared with their first recall of the first ballad, their first recall of the fifth ballad had one and a half times as many words, two times as many rhyming words, and three times as much line structure evident in the written recall protocols. Compared with novices, the 14 beginning experts more often filled in blank spaces in novel ballads with words of the correct number of syllables and more often chose the original stanza of a novel ballad that was paired with a changed version of the stanza. The beginning experts were also able to compose, in 20 min, ballads about two thirds as long as the 10-stanza ballads they learned. Thirty characteristics were identified in the set of the five learned ballads. The ballads composed by the beginning experts used over half of these. The beginning experts also explicitly stated about one quarter of these 30 characteristics, but there was no statistical relationship between the characteristics used and the characteristics stated. Memory expertise is viewed as a pervasive aspect of cognition in which people make use of a variety of regularities in the material to be learned.     

A schema for common cents

Drawings from memory of a penny, nickel, dime, and quarter were obtained from 125 undergraduates. The modal recalls for the heads of all four coins were identical, suggesting that a schema for coins exists. In an attempt to have the schema produced directly, another 75 students designed either a 2-, 7-, or 20-cent piece that would fit into our present currency. The modal drawing for this task was identical to the modal recalls. The schema for the heads derived from these experiments differs from existing coins and is not an average of them.