Evolution à long terme des stratégies dans une tâche de comparaison phrase-dessin

Abstract

Summary : Long term evolution of strategies in sentence-picture verification. Results of earlier experiments on subjects' cognitive processing during sentence-picture verification tasks indicate that spontaneous individual strategies are much more numerous and varied than the literature on this topic might suggest. To test the reliabilily of this finding, 13 subjects who had taken part in the original study were asked to participate one year later in the same sentence-picture verification task. Post-experintental verbal reports show that subjects retrieved their original strategy right from the outset of the experiment or after a few trials. Data analysis of processing times confirms verbatims. Regardless of the delay between two successive blocks of trials, or modification in instructions, the different subjects' individual mean processing times exhibit a stable pattern : sentence processing time and picture processing time form two distinct groups of variables where correlation is high; in contrast the low or null correlations across these two sets of processing times suggest they may be considered as independent. Key words : sentence-picture verification, strategies, individual differences.