Abstract
The anagram task is widely used in psychological research to manipulate independent factors such as successes/failures and cognitive load, and to measure dependent variables such as cognitive processing ability and task effort. The purposes of the present study were to clarify what factors determine the difficulty of an anagram and to develop a database of anagrams for psychological experiment. Nineteen university students worked on 147 five-letter hiragana anagrams. We measured the time required to solve each anagram and subjective difficulty as indexes of task difficulty, and familiarity, imageability, and valence as word characteristics. We found significant correlations between the task difficulty indexes and word characteristics, such that the higher the word characteristic ratings, the easier the anagram. This suggests that anagram task difficulty can be manipulated by considering word characteristics.
