Linguistic and spatial processings in solving three-term series problem
Hiroshi Yama · Japanese Psychological Research · 1987
The purpose of this study is to identify linguistic and spatial processings in solving three-term series problem by testing relations between this task and two verification tasks, one cornparing sentences against pictures, and the other comparing sentences against kana letters (Japanese syllabary). First, two premises of three-term series problem were presented successively and 35 college students were asked to indicate whether three terms were ordered linearly or not. Next, they participated in the two verification tasks. Twenty-six subjects whose RT data were individually fit to one of component models for the main task were classified into linguistic or spatial group by the value of two parameters. These parameters represented very stable strategies. There was a significant association between the linguistic-spatial grouping and the RT difference between the verification tasks. Moreover, subjects with large value of parameter for spatial models took longer time to solve the sentence-kana verification task than to solve the sentence-picture verification task. It was concluded that subjects who adopted spatial strategy were good at spatial processing and that, the poorer they were at linguistic processing, the larger were their spatial parameters.