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An attempt was made to determine the degree of relationship between 48 Ss' verbal descriptions of three-dimensional, binary-valued stimuli, and the linguistic structure present in the hypothesis-testing sequences when these Ss were presented with the same stimuli in a simple concept-identification task. It was observed that Ss manifested a type of “gambler's fallacy” when testing hypotheses in such situations, and that this imposes a structure on Ss concept-identification performance which, to a large extent, obscures the linguistic patterns which were observed to occur.

This experiment was designed to investigate the development of problem-solving strategies by subjects in a sentence-verification paradigm which permitted repeated exposure to problems of the same type. While it was predicted that subjects would show a general improvement across trials as a function of repeated exposure to similar sets of problems, nevertheless it was predicted that some types of problem would show little or no improvement across trials, while other problems would show significant improvement as the subjects determined more efficient strategies to use to aid in rapid solutions. The results illustrate that certain types of sentence-verification tasks allow the development of efficient strategies which significantly decrease reaction times across trials, while other problem types produce uniform response rates across problem sets with negligible improvement as a function of practice. The results ate interpreted in terms of the relative availability of problem-solving strategies for the different types of verification task.

Our previous studies of problem-solving strategies in verification tasks showed different response times for different problem types. This experiment studied the effects of manipulating sentence and picture information on response strategies of 20 upper-division college students. Spatial positioning of figures affected over-all decision times, and practice improved performance for negatively phrased descriptions.