Patterns of Preference in Locating Targets.

The article focuses on the task of a psychologist to discover the rules or laws governing mental activity. It examines three experiments in which a set of targets, equiprobable to the experimenter, are treated by the subjects as non-equiprobable. In one of the experiments, for the experimenter, the elements constitute a uniform display. The same feature characterized a further preliminary experiment. A subject is told that to each square has been assigned a number, and this number is recorded on a ticket in an urn. Three tickets will be successively drawn at random from the urn, with replacement after each draw. Before each draw, the subject indicates the square, which he thinks will be located by the ticket drawn. A Chi-square test shows that the first and third choices depart significantly from a uniform distribution, but not the second choice. The responses constitute a way of patterning the display, this patterning presumably being shaped by experience. The variation of pattern as between the three experiments suggests that the pattern or structure imposed is sensitive to the display and to the task.