An Instrumental-Learning Task for Human Subjects

Abstract

Most instrumental-learning situations are devised for animals. Some of them are directly applicable to humans, such as stylus mazes derived from ordinary mazes. In this case, however, the subjects have to be blindfolded. The mirror star-tracing task can be also an instrumental one, but it seems to require an unusual skill. There are also serial-search tasks, in which the finding of one clue gives directions for finding the second, the second for the third, and so on. The Tsai-Partington Numbers Test (Ammons, 1955) is an example. In this test a series of numbers, from 2 through some large number like 20, for instance, are randomly scattered on a sheet of paper. In the middle of the paper, the digit 1 appears, distinctly set off from the other numbers. Given a signal to start, the subject places his pencil on the 1, then searches for 2 and draws a line to it, then searches for 3, draws a line from 2 to 3, and so on. This task permits the experimenter to study separately each act of reaching the succeeding number from a given number.