Cartoon Drawings Research Articles

The Claparède phenomenon: A further example in amnesics, a demonstration of a similar effect in normal people with attenuated memory, and a reinterpretation

Three amnesics and four controls were asked to find hidden objects in cartoon drawings, and their success rate and search speed were noted over five learning trials. When latency on the first trial was equated in the two groups, amnesics were shown to learn the location of the test objects less rapidly than controls. Savings scores at seven weeks were similar in the two groups when amount of exposure during learning was equivalent. At seven weeks amnesics failed to recognize items that they were able to show savings on in terms of speed of search (the Claparede phenomenon), but a similar effect was demonstrated in the control group when tested some 17 months later. The implications of the results for various retrieval-deficit views of the amnesic syndrome were discussed.

Effects of Conceptual Task Difficulty on Generalized Persistence

A set of experiments tested whether the degree of effort rewarded in a conceptual task would affect subsequent persistence in a perceptual task. College students were presented with complex, simple, or unsolvable anagrams or, in a control group, merely read the anagram target words; the perceptual task requiring the identification of subtle or nonexistent differences between cartoon drawings followed. Those who had worked on unsolvable anagrams spent greater time on the cartoon drawings compared with those who had worked on simple anagrams or anagram target words, suggesting that initial failure on assigned tasks serves as a cue to work harder. The complex group spent more time on the cartoon task than the simple group, control group and, following sufficient failure, the unsolvable group. The complex group was also found to spend more time on the cartoons than a group which experienced exactly the same distribution of successes and failures on the anagrams but which always failed after high effort. Two interpretations of the superior persistence of the complex group were compared: (a) the degree of accustomed effort per reinforcer becomes a generalized component of instrumental behavior, and (b) high effort increases the habituation of frustration-produced disruptive responses.

A further investigation of children's understanding of recursive thinking

Forty children of different ages responded individually to cartoon drawings in one of two orders of presentation. Either they verbally described cartoons presented successfully or they selected from a cartoon display the one corresponding to a spoken description. A significant interaction between age, method of presentation, and type of thinking was found. Differences between these findings and results from previous research are discussed in terms of differences in linguistic complexity across methods of presentation.

Odets and "Little Lefty"

IN Cliford Odets: Playwright (New York, I97), Gerald Weales has noted that Waiting for Lefty (1935) was not based on direct knowledge of I934 New York taxi strike and has identified Joseph North's Taxi Strike (New Masses, April 3, I934) as one of Odets's chief sources: uses, almost as an epigraph, a long paragraph identified as 'Hackie's Fable,' in which wife demands-as Edna does in first scene of Lefty-that driver choose between her and company. Agate's identification of Communist salute with 'good old uppercut to chin' at end of Odets's play comes directly from North ('His left fist-a huge affair-goes up in a sort of short uppercut'), although North goes Odets one better at tough metaphor game by letting his Pondsie call it 'The left hook' (pp. 42-43). Closer examination of material confirms Weales's observation that Odets's was a flypaper talent and suggests even more analogues. Driver Joe Mitchell's description of himself and others as the black and blue boys, for instance, may have had its origin in Blue and Black Harlem taxis mentioned in North. Though Weales dutifully records importance of cartoon art in agit-prop plays of period and points to character of union boss Harry Fatt as an example of the standard cartoon stereotype (P. 44), his account does not, I suspect, fully explore influence of such material in Lefty. There are portions of play, such as Sid's outburst against big shot money men in Episode III, that are little more than cartoon drawings turned into speech: got power and mean to be damn sure they keep it. They know if they give in just an inch, all dogs like us will be down on them together-an ocean knocking them to hell and back and each singing cuckoo with stars coming from their nose and ears. In fact, cartoon art may well have supplied Odets with title to his play. By most accounts Lefty was written shortly before Group Theater's Boston run of Melvin Levy's Gold Eagle Guy. Since Levy play did not open until November I2, Odets would have had ample time to be familiar with new cartoon character Daily