Abstract
When attempting to reproduce units of a stimulus pattern in block-design construction tasks, subjects take longer to find a correctly oriented, two-color, diagonally divided surface than a correctly oriented solid-color surface. To examine the possible contribution of the diagonal orientation judgment itself to this outcome, a delayed matching-to-sample task was employed in which subjects attempted to find a match for either a diagonally divided or a perpendicularly divided half-red/half-white square. Slower response times for the former provided evidence that the greater difficulty in matching the two-color portions of the stimulus patterns in standard block-design tasks may be partially attributable to the oblique effect.
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This paper is based in part on a senior honors thesis by Mark M. Leach. Portions of this research were presented at the 1989 annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.
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Berch, D.B., Leach, M.M. The role of the oblique effect in the block-design selection process. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 28, 412–414 (1990). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334053
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334053