Previous research has established that happy and sad moods can affect persistence and success on a cognitive task, with happiness leading to higher performance and self-efficacy. Two experiments examined whether happiness also produces increased performance on a physical task and tested whether self-efficacy mediated the results. When mood inductions covered the full range from happy to sad, mood did influence physical performance. However, evidence regarding self-efficacy was equivocal. Efficacy for the performed task was unaffected by mood, although it remained a good predictor of performance. Since mood did alter efficacy for a nonperformed but more familiar task, inconsistent efficacy results could reflect task differences. The findings offer prospects for the use of mood inductions in practical sporting situations.

Experienced blind subjects have previously demonstrated good echo perception of size and distance and some echo-discrimination of shapes and textures. In three experiments untrained sighted subjects also proved able to echo-detect and recognize three simple shapes and to recognize fabric and wooden but not carpet and Plexiglas discs at significantly above chance levels. Some improvement occurred over the first few trials but little thereafter, suggesting that this sort of echo perception requires very little training. A blind subject exhibited over-all accuracy comparable to those of sighted subjects. There were, however, interesting differences between the blind subject and the sighted subjects in echo perception of specific stimuli and in approach to the task.

Three experiments with musicians and nonmusicians (N=338) explored variations of Deutsch's musical scale illusion. Conditions under which the illusion occurs were elucidated and data obtained which supported Bregman's suggestion that auditory streaming results from a competition among alternative perceptual organizations. In Experiment 1, a series of studies showed that it is more difficult to induce the scale illusion than might be expected if it is accepted that an illusion will be present for most observers despite minor changes in stimuli and experimental conditions. The stimulus sequence seems better described as an ambiguous figure. Having discovered conditions under which the scale illusion could be reliably induced, Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated additional properties of the stimulus (timbre, loudness, and tune) to provide cues to streaming other than pitch and location. The data showed that streaming of this sequence can be altered by these properties, supporting the notion of a general parsing mechanism which follows general gestalt principles and allows streaming by many stimulus dimensions. Finally, suggestions are made as to how this mechanism might operate.listening to music provides an excellent context for exploring the phenomenon of auditory streaming. Bregman and Campbell (1971) described auditory streaming as the perceptual splitting of concurrent auditory events into separate streams or sequences. This must happen, for example, when listeningto an orchestra. The listener needs to decide which melodies are being played by what instruments, where the sounds originated, and how many instruments and melodies there are.Research on auditory streaming has focused on much simpler situations than listening to an orchestra. Bregman and Campbell, for instance, binaurally presented subjects with a rapid repetitive sequence of six different 100·msec pure tones, three high pitched and three low pitched, one and a half octaves apart. Although successive tones alternated from the high-to low-pitch range, subjects organized the high-and low-pitched sounds into separate auditory streams. Some subjects (59%) claimed that these two streams were successive (i.e., three high tones followed by three low tones, or vice versa); the remainder reported that the streams were concurrent. Neither of these percepts are veridical. Deutsch (1975b) found similar effects when she pre-

Comprehension was compared for speeded reading and for listening to compressed speech. A reading and a listening group of literate adults were presented with three easy and three difficult passages, with one passage at each difficulty level presented at each of three speeds, 180, 290, and 380 words per minute. No difference between reading and listening comprehension levels or quality was found at any of the speeds or difficulty levels, contrary to previous suggestions of a listening disadvantage. Reading and listening comprehension were related to subjects' habitual reading speeds. There was evidence of a working-memory processing limit of about 275 words per minute. This processing limit indicates the importance of silent reading strategies.

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