Ability and personality factors in psychomotor learning and reminiscence

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the ability and personality factors important for performance on the Inverted Alphabet Printing (IA) task. Previous research has shown that most of the variance in psychomotor task performance is accounted for by factors specific to the task itself (Fleishman, 1953b.) The investigation was also designed to test the correlates of psychomotor Reminiscence and, in particular, a hypothesized correlation between Extraversion and Reminiscence (Eysenck, 1962). The personality theory of Eysenck proposes that persons scoring high on Extraversion generate reactive inhibition more quickly and thus show more Reminiscence than persons making low scores. To achieve the purposes of the research 33 reference tests, composed of ability and personality measures, were administered to 160 male undergraduate students at Arlington State College. The test were selected to represent factors often found related to psychomotor performance and included a comprehensive personality questionnaire. In addition to these tests, half of the Ss performed the IA task under massed practice conditions (no rest between trials) and half under distributed practice conditions (30 sec. rest between trials). Data were obtained from the massed group to furnish two measures of Reminiscence (a straight difference score and a residual gain measure). A Reminiscence score was obtained for a subset of the 160 Ss on the Pursuit Rotor to determine if the proposed correlation may be limited to that task. A factor analysis of the IA learning data yielded four factors common to both groups. The task loaded on only one of these factors for each group indicating that IA performance. similar to other psychomotor tasks, is largely specific to that task. Multiple correlation analyses of the same data produced very similar results, emphasizing that most of the variance of IA scores was independent of the reference tests. None of the reference tests correlated significantly with Reminiscence on IA. This did not support the theoretical position of Eysenck . However, a significant correlation was obtained between Pursuit Rotor Reminiscence and Extraversion, indicating that Reminiscence on these two tasks (IA and Pursuit Rotor) differs in its relation to Extraversion. The different findings with these tasks would also seem to imply a need for a restatement of the theory.