Three "tests" of intellectual competence (vocabulary, remote associates, trigram word-making) which permit cheating were standardized by rankings of 71 college students. The three tests were found to be equidistant along the dimension of perceived difficulty. Suggestions are made for using these tasks in cheating studies. (Author/SJL)

Several exercises are presented that are intended to challenge and "limber up" the translator's manipulation of words, meanings, and connotations. The exercises point up the complexity of the translating task and encourage the translator to make the most of this fact. The focus is on French and English. (MSE)

The complexity hypothesis suggests that the hierarchical arrangement of learning tasks is related to the complexity of the task. Using a definition of complexity based on an analysis of the rules governing performance on a task, the present study lent support to the hypothesis. (Author/GDC)

Results of this study demonstrated that while positive occupational information alone leads to greater simplicity, negative or mixed information significantly retards the trend toward greater simplicity. Results are discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives, especially with reference to the typical occupational information…

It was hypothesized that the concept of cognitive effort in memory is both useful and important. Cognitive effort was defined as the engaged proportion of limited- capacity central processing. Four experiments were conducted, and the implications and potential applications of the concept were discussed. (Author/MH)

Presents a study of the effects of the occupation of an individual's personal space on that individual's judgment of the invader when the invader's attitudes are known to the invadee. Also studies the effect of the difficulty of the task on the relationship between spatial orientation and interpersonal attraction. (JMF)

The concept of sentence weights (the assigning of numerical scores based on hierarchical modification) seems to be a more sophisticated measure for looking at syntactic complexity than the T-Unit. (DD)

Presents an approach for helping students to explore the auditory level of meaning of a poem in a step-by-step manner. (TJ)

Reports on a study that examined the effect of intended audience and mode of discourse on the syntactic complexity of compositions written by sixth- and tenth-graders, and that attempted to determine whether there were increases in syntactic complexity from grade 6 to grade 10 for each audience and in each mode. (DD)

Four experiments are presented that examine the affective and the informational explanations of risk-preference behavior. Experiments I and II provide a phenomenological analysis of the affective and informational determinants of choice behavior while Experiments III and IV investigates at what level of difficulty individuals most desire…

On each of 10 trials, 80 college students were presented with a different set of five anagram tasks varying in complexity. Half the subjects rated the tasks for the amount of interestingness and half for the amount of pleasantness. (Editor/RK)

Examined possibility that arousability as manifested in sensitization contributes to individual differences in infants' attentional profiles. Sensitization tended to occur more frequently with more complex than with less complex checkerboards. Infants showing sensitization looked longer and did not habituate as readily as infants who showed no…

Interviews with 10 high school students with learning disabilities identified 3 themes concerning homework: (1) factors that make homework easy (such as assigning homework early in the class); (2) factors that make homework difficult (such as low ability); and (3) recommendations for teachers, students, and parents (for example, students should…

It is often presumed that software technology will increase group productivity, but this may not be the case. Examines the impact of technology on time-to-complete-task, member satisfaction, perceived information load, number of contributing transactions, and task complexity. Three appendices provide examples of complex and simple tasks and the…

Results of three studies, involving 606 high school and college students, show that the perceived randomness of a sequence is better predicted by its encoding difficulty than its objective randomness. Results imply that judging the extent of randomness of a sequence is based on the attempt to encode it. (SLD)