ISSN:
1469-8986
Source:
Blackwell Publishing Journal Backfiles 1879-2005
Topics:
Medicine
,
Psychology
Notes:
To assess the effects of instructions and task difficulty on task, cardiovascular, and respiratory behavior in a situation where the instructions were either given once or repeated on the second day, a 3 by 3 by 2 experimental design was employed. Three sets of instructions (POSITIVE, CONTROL, NEGATIVE) were compared factorially with three difficulty levels (EASY, MODERATE, HARD) of a slide identification task, and observations were carried out over 2 consecutive daily sessions in which the initial instructions were repeated for only half of the subjects on the second day. Thirty-six undergraduates served as subjects and simple reaction time, error rate, heart rate, respiration rate, respiration amplitude, skin temperature (hand and forehead), and diastolic blood pressure were recorded simultaneously. That task conditions were different from one another was confirmed by comparisons of reaction time and errors during the tasks, with the EASY groups exhibiting the best performance and the HARD groups showing the longest reaction times and the most errors. That the differential instructions influenced cardiovascular performance was evident when comparisons were made among finger pulse amplitude, diastolic blood pressure, and hand temperature. Reaction times and error rates were unaffected by the differential instructions. With the exception of diastolic blood pressure, comparisons between days 1 and 2 revealed that instructional differences which emerged on day 1 were either attenuated or eliminated by day 2. Comparisons between repeated and non-repeated instruction groups failed to yield any reliable differences.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.1981.tb01823.x
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