The influence of amount of practice upon the formation of a scale of judgment.

Preserved learning and memory in amnesia: Intact adaptation-level effects and learning of stereoscopic depth.

“…A weight judgment task (Tresselt, 1947) was used to determine whether amnesic patients exhibit normal adaptation-level effects.…”

“…Little work has been done to determine whether these effects typically persist beyond the minute or two required to judge one set of stimuli and then another; little is also known about the role of conscious, declarative knowledge in adaptation-level effects. Nevertheless, the adaptation-level phenomenon is robust, having been observed in the visual (Helson, 1948;Helson & Michels, 1948), auditory (Johnson, 1949;Long, 1937;Pratt, 1933), and tactual (Dinnerstein, 1965;Helson, 1947;Tresselt, 1947) modalities. In Experiments 1A and IB we examined whether adaptation-level effects in the tactual modality can persist across a 20-min interval and whether amnesic patients exhibit these effects to the same extent as do normal subjects.…”

The influence of instructions on the adjustment of scales

“…The claim that conditioning processes contribute to the formation of scales is not new at all. It has been made by many authors (e.g., Guilford, 1954;Haubensak, 1992;Siegel & Siegel, 1972;Tresselt, 1947;Tresselt & Volkmann, 1942;Wedell,1984). Tresselt and Volkman, for example, proposed the hypothesis that the principles of judgment are the principles of conditioning (cf.…”

“…Numerous studies (e.g., Di Lollo, 1964;Di Lollo & Casseday, 1965;Johnson, 1949;Tresselt, 1947;Ward, 1987;Ward & Lockhead, 1970;Wedell, 1984) have shown that first experience in a series of stimuli affects the judgment of the second series. Tresselt, for example, found that a group of subjects who had first judged the 4 heaviest of 12 weights called a heavier weight medium than did a group of subjects who first judged the 4 lightest weights.…”

“…In the experiments of Di Lollo (1964), Di Lollo and Casseday (1965), and Wedell (1984), the presentations proceeded smoothly from the training to the test series without any interruption or warning at the point of shift. Tresselt (1947) interrupted the presentations for 5 min, Ward (1987) and Ward and Lockhead (1970) continued only on the next day, but the subjects were never told that they would be judging a shifted set of stimuli. Thus, it is not surprising that two thirds of Tresselt's subjects voiced their surprise when they were given first a weight well beyond the range of those in the practice series; a few stated spontaneously that the stimuli must belong to a new series.…”