Three experiments examined the nature of individual differences and the role of advance information in reading comprehension. Subjects read short passages, in some cases preceded by a given type of advance organizer, then recalled the information therein, and finally sorted ideas from the passage into groups of similar ideas. Parameter estimates for the Kintsch and van Dijk (1978) model, together with a derived measure for the idea-sorting task, showed that good readers were better at recalling propositions and organizing ideas than poorer readers. When the effects of different types of advance organizers were considered, it was found that good readers usually showed greater recall of detail when given either type of advance organizer, whereas poorer readers displayed enhanced recall of detail only for a particular type of advance organizer.

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An experiment to test an encounter group assumption that touching increases interpersonal attraction was conducted. Twenty-one college women were randomly assigned to a touch or no-touch condition. In the touch condition the subject was paired with an experimental accomplice who joined her in three bogus ESP experiments, the last of which involved mutual touching for 11o seconds. The no-touch condition was identical, save touching. Subjects then evaluated the experimental accomplice on four dimensions. A comparison of total evaluation scores verified the hypothesis: subjects who touched the accomplice perceived her as a more attractive person than those who did not touch her.

This article examines the classification of link types within hypertext databases. Do labeled links act as cues, enabling understanding of the structure and leading to more informed navigational choices? Although there is anecdotal evidence that indicating link types to readers is useful in hypertext systems, there is little experimental data to support this position. This study tries to provide an experimental basis for the development of labels identifying link types. It addresses whether labeling the different types of links affects hypertext searching by providing or enhancing a structure for readers of nonlinear texts. An experiment was run to determine which of the following three conditions serve users with better cues and lead to increased performance in both browsing and querying scenarios: 1) Providing only organizational links; 2) Adding unlabeled semantic, rhetorical, and pragmatic links in addition to the organizational links; and 3) Adding labeled semantic, rhetorical, and pragmatic links to the organizational links. The experiment used a between subjects design where subjects were library science students. SuperBook was used as the hypertext platform and the OCLC Cataloguing Users' Guide was used as the hypertext document. The statistical results indicate that there was no significant difference between the three conditions in the browsing task. However, subjects who had labeled content‐based links performed significantly better on the querying task. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Two experiments were conducted to determine if discontinuity detection limits the visual integration of two stimuli presented successively. If this is the case, then presenting two dim stimuli should permit better integration than presenting two bright stimuli. In Experiment 1, five observers named the position of the missing dot in a 5 x 5 dot matrix. Twelve randomly selected dots were presented in each of two stimulus presentations. The stimuli varied in intensity in a ratio of 15:1 and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) varied between 50 msec and 80 msec. At the longer SOAs, presenting two bright stimuli led to a higher percentage of correct responses than presenting two dim stimuli. There was no difference between those conditions at the shorter SOAs. In Experiment 2, 12 naive observers rated the amount of integration of the same stimuli on a 7-point scale, under the same presentation conditions. Rated integration was higher with two dim stimuli than with two bright stimuli. These apparently contradictory results are explained in terms of Hawkins and Shulman's distinction between two kinds of visual persistence. It is concluded that subjects can respond to integration and discontinuity detection separately. No evidence was found that discontinuity detection limits the integration.