TABLE 2.
Activity lists
| List A |
List B |
||
|---|---|---|---|
| Activity | Description | Activity | Description |
| Maze | A long, visually complex maze | Dot-to-dot | A 32-point dot-to-dot task |
| Checkbook balance | Table containing a starting balance and a series of credits and debits to be calculated | Practical math | Two math problems, where a total and sales tax were to be calculated; one also required calculation of a tip |
| Picture copy | Two detailed line drawings that were to be copied | Incomplete pictures | Ten line drawings with missing components that had to be drawn in |
| Word find | A 12-item word find task | Crossword | A 15 × 17-item crossword puzzle |
| Supermarket shopping list | A list of ingredients that had to be transcribed under 5 meal headings | Phone number find | Nine phone numbers had to be found and transcribed from a list of 54 fictitious, alphabetically listed phone numbers |
| Word jumbles | A list of 15 scrabbled words that had to be unscrambled and written | News story | A news story regarding politics in Bolivia that was to be read aloud |
| Mapping | An exercise where a line was to be drawn to 10 consecutive destinations on a map of a fictitious land | Letter edit | A fictional letter to a landlord that contained many typos that had to be proofread and corrected |
| Picture find | A visually complex, 15-item picture find | Appointment scheduling | Twelve events to be scheduled on a month view calendar; some to be scheduled events included compound instructions |
Note. Table displays activity lists used in the current study. Each activity was completed one at a time in a random order. Participants completed one list and observed the experimenter complete the other list. List assignments were counterbalanced across participants. Activity performances were terminated after 2 min, and each activity was designed to require more than 2 min to complete, assuring that participants and experimenters would be engaged in each task for the allotted time. All activity stimuli were black and white and were presented on 8.5″ × 11″ sheets of paper. There were no differences between the lists with regard to memory performances (all ts = 0.28 to 1.12, ps = .30 to .78). Participants were not told that their memory for the activities would be tested later, but they did rate their liking of each task on 5-point rating Likert (1 = not at all, 3 = neutral, 5 = a lot) after its completion.