Abstract
This study replicated vanMarle and Scholl (2003) Experiment 1 comparing objects (boxes) and substances (boxes that converted into streams). Sixteen participants followed four targets moving among 4 distractors. There were four blocks of 10 trials (or movies) each counterbalanced using a Latin-square. There was a response sheet for each trial with eight boxes that corresponded to the ending screen. Participants marked on the sheets the locations of the four targets. Prior to doing the MOT task, participants predicted their performance in relation to their gender and the opposite gender. A post-test on those predictions was also given. Similar to vanMarle and Scholl, participants were able to follow objects better than substances. Males tended to perform the task (73 percent) better than females (67 percent). All participants predicted that they could follow four objects. However, female participants revised their predicted performance downward more drastically than male participants (a difference of 1.1 versus 0.3 on a 5 point scale). Post task evaluation of performance was not related to actual performance. Gender differences might have been the result of strategy differences. More female subjects reported using a strategy of selecting a subset to follow of the four targets while males more frequently reported trying to ‘zone out’ or ‘focus’ their attention on the whole display.
The authors would like to thank vanMarle and Scholl for the use of their (2003) stimuli.