Anagram Experiments


     On p. 25 in the discussion of the experiments on anagrams, your text states that "Each way of arranging the letters can be considered a response in the habit family hierarchy."

     Note that 5 letters have 5! or 120 different orderings. (If you want to see all 120 of them for the letters {b e a h c} then click on the top thumbnail image below. To see a graphical picture of the trace of the recursive function that generated these orderings, click on the bottom thumbnail image below ). In the anagram experiment, subjects were given one ordering, e.g. beahc and the average of the times that it took subjects to arrive at the correct answer (in this case beach) was analyzed.

  • Critique this set of experiments and the theoretical interpretation of the results.
  • And, find one or more friends and run the following experiment measuring the amount of time (in seconds) it takes your friend to find the answer.

to the left below are six 5-letter words. In the middle column are arrangements that are a cyclic permutation of the word on the left. The right hand column are also a permutation of the word on the left. Choose three items from the middle and three from the right column but no two from the same row, and use these in your experiment.

 beach  hbeac  ahbce
 train  intra  itnar
 sugar  garsu  urgsa
 crate  ratec  tearc
 heart  thear  rehta
 model  eldom  dmleo
       When you have completed your experiment look at the data by rank ordering the 6 times and then computing and comparing the average rank for items from the middle column with those from the column on the right. (If you did this experiment with more than one friend, do this scoring separately for each friend.)If you obtained some clear results, comment on these results in relation to the discussion of S-R psychology in your text.**
  ** For the instructor's comments click here.


Here are some additional questions to think about (but you needn't hand your thoughts in):

Is this a typical type of task involving thinking?
Is there an optimal strategy for solving these problems?
What might the distribution of probabilities look like for the 120 different orderings associated with a word?
Could a person generate all of these orderings?

 

Associationism and Behaviorism

  
 © Charles F. Schmidt