Abstract
This report adds data to complement those in a prior report (Marx, 1979) in which retention and transfer were found to be inhibited, for male but not for female subjects, when the subjects serving as observers were required to score their paired partners’ responses in acquisition. The new data were obtained from two high school classes who first learned names for full line-drawn faces and then were given interpolated transfer tests on the individual features from those faces (reversing the procedure used in the first experiment). Few reliable main effects were found in these two sets of data, analyzed separately, but there were a large number of reliable interactions. The major result was that female subjects were clearly superior on transfer tests after they had observed in acquisition, whereas males were equally proficient after observation and performance.
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Thanks are due Joan Girnis, psychology teacher at Naples Senior High School, Naples, Florida, for her cooperation in this experiment. Her two psychology classes were used, as part of the course work, to familiarize the students with psychological experimentation. In class periods subsequent to the collection of the data, the experiment was described and the nature of experimental psychology was generally discussed by the experimenter. I am also indebted to Kathleen Marx for assistance in the collection of data and to Monica Moore and George Seymour for assistance in the statistical analysis. This research was supported in part by the author’s Research Career Award from the National Institute of Mental Health and by a grant from the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and are in no way endorsed by the U.S. Army.
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Marx, M.H. Multiple-choice learning of line-drawn facial features: II. Sex differences. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 14, 439–441 (1979). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329504
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329504