Chess expertise in children

This paper reports several studies of chess expertise in children who play competitive chess. The first study examines (1) the relationship between experience and skill among 113 school-age children (grades 1 through 12); and (2) the relationship between chess skill and scores on various spatial and logical abilities tests among the top 15 players. Improvement in skill is related to experience, and chess players score higher than average on the Raven's Progressive Matrices. Also, scores on a chess-specific test, the Knight's Tour, correlate with scores on the Raven's. The second study reports three experiments with 59 Ss involving chess-specific tasks in memory, perception, and similarity judgements. The first two experiments replicated and extended Chase and Simon (1973). The third experiment, which asked Ss to judge similarities of chess positions, demonstrated that similarity judgements become more global and abstract with increased skill. The final section describes qualitatively how children's chess expertise compares to that of adults. Drawing upon Anderson (1985), we focus on some distinctive features of children's chess play and on some successful techniques in coaching young players.     

Design and evaluation of a programmed course in introductory psychology

The design of a programmed course in introductory psychology, utilizing an interview procedure, is described. The performance of students in this course was compared with that of students covering the same subject matter but taught in a more conventional manner. Students in the experimental course scored significantly higher on objective and essay final examinations and rated the course more positively.     

Metatraits

ABSTRACT A metatrait is the trait of having versus not having a trait It refers to whether a given trait dimension or construct can be used to describe a particular personality Using attitudes as an analog to traits, we argue that the study of personality may benefit from considering metatraits Implications for the nature of traits and for the formation and disappearance of traits within a personality are discussed We review strategies for measuring metatraits and conclude that at present it seems best to use interitem variance in responses to specific, familiar trait scales Metatraits will most commonly moderate trait effects, especially such that hypotheses about traits are appropriately tested only with trailed individuals Untraited individuals may be susceptible to fluctuating states and situational manipulations Sometimes metatraits may predict behavior directly, independently of trait level Two studies are reported to illustrate metatrait moderation of trait effects and direct prediction of behavior by metatrait     

Detection and identification thresholds for consonant-vowel syllables

Detection and identification thresholds were obtained for 6- and 10-year-old normal children and normal adults using five-formant synthesized consonant-vowel ([baHdflrfea]) stimuli. Sixyear-old children were found to have poorer detection than adults, just as they do for pure tones. For the identification task, the slopes of the performance-intensity functions were more shallow for 6-year-old children than for 10-year-olds and adults. Consequently, compared with 10-yearolds and adults, 6-year-old listeners require a greater increase in stimulus intensity above detection threshold to identify these stimuli at a high performance level. The influence of acoustic characteristics of the stimuli on all listeners is also discussed.