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What is the nature of the representation underlying memory for future tasks such as calling the doctor or buying milk? If this representation consists of a verbal instruction that is translated into action at the time of retrieval, then memory should be better when tested via verbatim recall of the instruction than when tested via actual performance. Three experiments rejected this possibility, indicating better memory for a perform mode of report than for a recall mode of report. This was true in Experiment 1 in which subjects saw a series of verbal instructions (e.g., "move the eraser," "lift the cup," "touch the ashtray"), with advance information regarding the mode of report required during testing. In Experiment 2, the advance cue was valid only in 75% of the trials. Memory depended more heavily on the expected mode of report than on the actual mode of report, suggesting that the perform superiority is due to processes that occur during encoding. In Experiment 3, subjects learned 20 phrases depicting minitasks. More tasks were remembered by subjects tested via performance than by subjects tested via verbatim recall. A second part of Experiment 3 also indicated superior memory when a perform test was expected, regardless of which mode of report was actually required. The results were compared with the finding that subject-performed tasks are better remembered than are their verbal instructions, which suggests that the representation underlying memory for future assignments may take advantage of the imaginal-enactive properties of the envisaged acts. Other possible differences between memory for to-be-recalled tasks and memory for to-be-performed tasks are discussed.

Two hypotheses regarding mental rotation were contrasted. If subjects rotate each stimulus image to the upright (the image rotation hypothesis), then response time should depend solely on the extent of angular deviation from the upright. But if subjects rotate their frame of reference to match that of the disoriented stimulus (the frame rotation hypothesis), then response time should vary with the angular deviation between the current stimulus and the preceding stimulus. In four experiments, one involving normal and reflected letters (Experiment 1) and the other three involving lexical decisions on Hebrew letter strings (Experiments 2, 3A, and 3B), much stronger evidence for the image rotation hypothesis was found, though weak but systematic effects of frame rotation were also obtained. Increased likelihood that the same orientation would be repeated (Experiment 4) did not yield any stronger frame rotation effects. Also there was no indication of consistent individual differences in the preference for the frame rotation strategy (Experiment 3B). Additional findings pertinent to the application of the mental rotation paradigm to word recognition were discussed.

Hebrew-speaking subjects were presented with 42 pairs of Chinese characters designating antonymic concepts and were required to match them with their corresponding Hebrew words. Correct translation was significant and was related to foreign language study and academic experience. Highest success was found for the activity domain of the semantic differential and for attributes judged to afford a diagrammatic representation. Examination of the character-referent relationships suggested that translation success was due to principles of figural symbolism rather than to pictographic representation of the attributes in question. The results are seen as suggestive of the effects of figural symbolization on the invention and/or evolution of natural scripts and are discussed in terms of the manner in which the graphic medium has been fashioned to convey abstract concepts.

The purpose of this study was to examine the significance of Brown and McNeill's (1966) findings regarding the "tip of the tongue" (TOT) phenomenon, A modified version of their procedure was used with 56 Ss. Although their findings that Ss in a TOT state can detect parts and properties of the missing word were generally replicated, a division of the TOT state into a variety of substates showed correct detection rate to vary greatly, depending on the substate involved. In addition, correct detection of partial information was demonstrated even when S declared he had no knowledge of the selected word (don't know). It was suggested that a distinction be made between information detection based on knowledge of the characteristics common to the class of items of which the target is a member ("class detection") and detection based on knowledge of characteristics specific to the target in question ("differential detection"). Both class and differential detection were found to obtain in TOT states as well as in the don't know state. Some theoretical and methodological implications were suggested.

Hebrew-speaking students performed lexical decisions on Hebrew letter strings that appeared at different orientations. Response times evidenced a strong interaction between string length and orientation. At angular deviations of less than 60 degrees from the upright, neither orientation nor string length had any effect, suggesting that words were directly, and probably holistically, recognized. The results for the 60 degrees deviation, while also exhibiting no effects of word length, yielded slower response times, suggesting a holistic rectification process. For deviations between 60 degrees and 120 degrees, the effects of disorientation increased sharply with increasing string length, suggesting piecemeal processing that may be due to the utilization of reading units smaller than the whole word or to piecemeal rectification. In this region, stimulus disorientation appears to impair word recognition by disrupting transgraphemic information rather than by interfering with letter identification. Extreme disorientations, 120 degrees or more, exhibited no further impairment with increased disorientation, and all evidenced strong and similar length effects, suggesting letter-by-letter reading. The implications of the results for the reading of normal and transformed text are discussed.

Koriat (1975), using a word-matching phonetic symbolism task, found a significant relationship between translation accuracy and the degree of subjective confidence associated with the response. This study examined the hypothesis that since responses on which subjects are in consensus are more likely correct than incorrect, confidence ratings may actually be related to the degree of consensus, regardless of the correctness of the response. The results strongly supported this hypothesis. For items with a consensually correct response, translation accuracy increased with degree of subjective confidence, while for items with a consensually incorrect response it decreased. Consensual responses were judged subjectively more compelling than nonconsensual responses regardless of their accuracy. Some implications of these findings are outlined.

In each of the 6 work days of a 2-week period, approximately equal numbers of passers-by were presented with the question "What day is today?" The experiment took place in Israel, using a total of 273 Ss. Average RT for the production of a correct response revealed a clear curvilinear relationship with the ordinal position of the day of the week, with longest RTs obtained with midweek target days. Errors revealed a similar curvilinear relationship, being most frequent in the middle of the week. These results are discussed in terms of the utilization of temporal landmarks (e.g., the Sabbath) in the process of time orientation. Additional data regarding the distribution of errors and Ss' introspective reports are presented and speculations regarding the mechanism involved are offered.

Past research has shown that speed of identifying single letters or digits is largely indifferent to orientation, whereas the recognition of single words or connected text is markedly disrupted by disorientation. In a series of four experiments, we attempted to reconcile these findings. The results suggest that disorientation does not impair the identification of the characters but disrupts the perception of their spatial arrangement. When spatial order information is critical for distinguishing between different stimuli, disorientation is disruptive because some rectification process is required to restore order information. Utilizing the similarity between the letter B and the number 13, we found strong effects of orientation when a stimulus was interpreted as the two-digit number 13 but not when interpreted as the single letter B. This, however, occurred only when the set of numbers to be classified included permutations of the same digits (Experiments 1 and 2). Odd-even decisions on single-digit and two-digit numbers (Experiment 3) yielded strong effects of stimulus orientation for order-dependent numbers (e.g., 32), weaker effects for order-independent numbers (e.g., 24), and none for repeated-digit (e.g., 22) or single-digit numbers. Classification time for two-letter Hebrew words evidenced strong effects of orientation for words that differed only in letter order but much weaker effects for words that had no letters in common, even when these were embedded within some words that did (Experiment 4).

Recent studies have shown that response time in mental rotation increases with the angular deviation between the current and preceding stimuli, suggesting a frame rotation process in which the intrinsic frame of the previous stimulus is brought into congruence with the coordinates of the current stimulus. In contrast, we show that this process involves image rotation in which the present stimulus is brought into alignment with the orientation of the previous stimulus. Such "backward alignment" succeeds only for shape-preserving sequences (i.e., identical stimuli at different orientations). Four experiments show that the backward alignment process (a) competes with the uprighting process typically found in mental rotation, and the response is determined by the process requiring the shortest rotational path; (b) is related to the tendency to repeat the previous response; (c) is insensitive to the position of the vertical; (d) is indifferent to the representation of the stimulus in long term memory; and (e) is different from the process underlying preparation for a stimulus in a specified orientation.

American subjects matched English antonym pairs with antonym pairs from Thai, Kannada, and Yoruba. For each match they also,indicated their degree of feeling of knowing (FOK). Although translation accuracy was in general better than chance, suggesting universal phonetic symbolism, it was found to vary considerably with the subject's FOK ratings: Translations evoking stronger FOK were more likely to be correct than translations evoking weaker FOK, and matches which proved correct were assigned higher FOK ratings than matches which proved incorrect. Several implications of the finding that subjects can monitor their success in guessing the meaning of words from foreign languages are outlined.

Reflection decisions on alphanumeric characters display systemic effects of disorientation, suggesting that subjects mentally rotate the stimulus to the upright (the uprighting process). However, response time also increases with increasing angular disparity between the current and preceding orientations. This occurs only when the current stimulus is brought into congruence with the preceding one (the backward alignment process). In the present study, we examined the hypothesis that the transformation that occurs in backward alignment in holistic even in tasks in which the uprighting process is likely to be piecemeal. Evidence supporting this hypothesis is presented on the basis of tasks requiring either classification of numbers (Experiments 1 and 3) and words (Experiment 2), or mirror image discrimination on letter pairs (Experiment 4). The results indicated that backward alignment establishes global correspondence between successive stimuli and is indifferent to local correspondence at the level of the constituent elements. The establishment of this global correspondence decreases with the number of elements in the stimulus (Experiment 5), but its effects are still observed for four-letter strings (Experiment 6).