In 1927, Jersild found that alternately subtracting 3 from a two-digit number and giving the common opposite to a word in a mixed list of numbers and words was faster than the average speed of subtracting 3s from a pure list of numbers and giving the opposites to a pure list of words. Experiment I replicated those findings: mixed lists were slightly, albeit nonsignificantly, faster than pure lists. Experiments II, III, and IV were designed to determine why changes of set did not slow performance on mixed lists: the results suggest that a shift of operations will take little or no time if the stimulus can serve as a retrieval cue for the operation to be performed on it. But changes of set will have a large effect when the selection of the appropriate operation requires that one keep track of previously performed operations.
[1]
I Biederman,et al.
Human performance in contingent information-processing tasks.
,
1972,
Journal of experimental psychology.
[2]
E. S. Robinson,et al.
Two factors in the work decrement
,
2022
.
[3]
Irving Biederman,et al.
Mental set and mental arithmetic
,
1973,
Memory & cognition.
[4]
A. G. Bills.
Fatigue, oscillation, and blocks.
,
1935
.
[5]
A. G. Bills.
Blocking: a new principle of mental fatigue.
,
1931
.
[6]
A. G. Bills.
Some causal factors in mental blocking.
,
1935
.