人間における自発的交替現象の研究I

児童における試行間隔, 刺激の異質性の交替率に及ぼす効果

抄録

Previous animal studies indicate that spontaneous alternation decreases with the increase of inter-response intervals but Solomon (14) failed to find the same time function in human adults. He interpreted the results in terms of the subject's conception of chance rather than basic response mechanisms. On the other hand, Wingfield (18) obtained a fairly high degree of alternation (i. e. 80%) in human adults when two heterogeneous (i. e. red and blue) stimulus objects were used.
From these two studies, it is expected that (1) if lack of the time function in spontaneous alternation is due to the subject's concept of chance in adults, the same function would appear in young children who would not fully establish the chance conception and (2) if this be true, although it may be slight, the function would be enhanced with two heterogeneous objects because it increases spontaneous alternation and lastly, (3) it was designed to determine whether color or position cues are more dominant for the alternation phenomenon.
In Experiment I-A a very slight but statistically signifficant time function in alternation was observed in junior grade-school children who were required individually to guess 21 times in successsion in which side (right or left) correct answer were written but with no imformation given about their guesses (Table 1, Fig. 1). A group test was made in Experiment I-B where five blocks (separated by 50 min.) of 11 guesses with an inter-response interval of five sec. were required of the subject following the procedure in Experiment I-A but this time, a circle on the left side and a cross on the left were used an stimuli. Percentage of alternation decreased significantly from five sec. to 50 min., again confirming our expectation (Table 2). This time function was higher and more distinct as predicted when two stimuli were heterogeneous, i. e., red and blue in Experiment I-C (Table 3, Fig. 1). In addition alternation was found to be negatively correlated with position preferences (Table 3 & 4).
Experiment 2-A showed that the percentage of alternation was greater with red and blue objects than with two red objects (Table 5). The percentage for the heterogeneous group was 90% for the initial two responses but in decreased with responses. Again position habits were inversely related to alternation. When red and blue stimuli were presented with shifting positions alternation was reduced. In addition, positional alternation was slightly dominant over color alternation but the reverse and insignificant relationship was found between the inital two responses (Table 6). The former results are contradictory to Glanzer's theory (4) but agreed with Rothkopf and Zeaman (12).