THE EFFECTS OF TASK CHARACTERISTICS ON RESPONSE LATENCY AND LATENCY TRENDS DURING LEARNING AND OVERLEARNING

Even though response latency can vary greatly among subjects and from trial to trial for the same subject, latency as a measure of associate strength might be useful in connection with response frequency to measure degree of learning. The effects on atency and learning of two task variablestraining procedure (anticipation vs. recall) and information transmission (amount of information required for errorless responding)--were investigated using a factorial design. Several aspects of latency as pos.Sible basis for Ostructional decisions Were studied: the "TLE, " or.trial of last error; i.e., the trial immediately-preceding the correct criterion response of N successive errorless trials; the correctness of response; item difficulty, individUal differences, and the TLE; maximum response latency on the TLE; and errors made subsequent to the first correct response. A series of eight stimuli that transmitted different amounts of information were presented to the 96 subjects on the display screen of an on-line computer. Subjects responded via a keyboard, which also gave them feedback. The main conclusion from many interesting results was that latency is not a sensitive measure of associative strength during the pre-TLE period, but it ma