Raymond E. Christal

Intercorrelations among ratings on 35 personality traits, selected as representative of the personality domain, were obtained for eight samples. These samples differed in length of acquaintanceship from 3 days to more than a year; in kind of acquaintanceship from assessment programs in a military training course to a fraternity house situation; in type of subject from airmen with only a high-school education to male and female undergraduate students to first-year graduate students; and in type of rater from very naive persons to clinical psychologists and psychiatrists with years of experience in the evaluation of personality. Centroid or multiple-group factors were extracted and rotated orthogonally to simple structure. For one study, an independent solution was obtained in which analytic rotations were accomplished on an IBM 650 computer using Kaiser's normal varimax criterion. Five fairly strong and recurrent factors emerged from each analysis, labeled as (a) Surgency, (b) Agreeableness, (c) Dependability, (d) Emotional Stability, and (e) Culture.

Abstract : In five experiments with over 2,500 subjects, we examined the hypothesis that cognitive processing variables measuring breadth of declarative knowledge and information processing speed were related to learning outcomes on a paired-associates task. Experiments 1 and 2 compared recall with recognition tests, Experiment 3 assessed the effect of study-block size, Experiment 4 examined the effect of mnemonic strategy, and Experiment 5 tested the effect of mixing study times and presenting words versus nonsense syllable stimuli. Across all experiments, breadth of verbal knowledge was found to be a strong predictor of retention overall, and a strong predictor in increment in retention benefit due to increases in study time. Mnemonic strategy training improved retention but also served to enhance the relationship between knowledge and retention. Memory search speed also predicted retention, but primarily under conditions of high information flow, either as a result of short (5 seconds per pair) study or time-sharing pressure (mixed study-time blocks). High-knowledge subjects and Fast Memory-Search subjects were also quicker at retrieving the answer, when they knew the answer; but High-Knowledge subjects took longer in retrieving an answer under conditions of uncertainty. Results are discussed in terms of a general model of associative learning in which encoding is viewed as a process of generating links by constructing elaborations of the terms studied. Keywords: Cognition, Cognitive ability, Computerized testing, Individual differences, Learning, Learning ability.