Subjects' assessment of the processing demands of a series of orienting tasks

This study is designed to show that subject are able to assess the processing demands made by a series of orienting tasks. With the help of 6 psychology majors, 56 orienting questions were generated which could be applied to a black and white photograph of a human face. Using a systematic ranking and reduction procedure, 3 groups of 12 undergraduate majors then ordered all or a subset of these questions in terms of their relative processing demands, resulting finally in a representative set of 7 questions. Two further groups of 12 subjects then ranked these questions by considering them in relation to a photograph of a male and a female face respectively. Inter-subject agreement was demonstrated for both of these latter rankings which were also shown to be independent of the stimulus photograph used. In Part 2 of the study, the validity of the orienting question ranking was shown by using the questions in an incidental learning task. Significant positive correlations were found between processing demand and recognition scores and between processing demand and processing time. The results are discussed in relation to metacognition, introspection and consciousness.