Investigating touchscreen typing: the effect of keyboard size on typing speed

Two studies investigated the effect keyboard size has on typing speed and error rates for touchscreen keyboards using the lift-off strategy. A cursor appeared when users touched the screen and a key was selected when they lifted their finger from the screen. Four keyboard sizes were investigated ranging from 24.6 cm to 6.8 cm wide. Results indicate that novices can type approximately 10 words per minute (WPM) on the smallest keyboard and 20 WPM on the largest. Experienced users improved to 21 WPM on the smallest keyboard and 32 WPM on the largest. These results indicate that, although slower, small touchscreen keyboards can be used for limited data entry when the presence of a regular keyboard is not practical. Applications include portable pocket-sized or palmtop computers, messaging systems, and personal information resources. Results also suggest the increased importance of experience on these smaller keyboards. Research directions are suggested.     

Dimensions underlying children's emotion concepts.

Prior evidence had indicated that for adults, emotion concepts (as indexed by words such as "happiness," "fear") are interrelated in a highly systematic fashion. These interrelationships can be represented by placing emotion words in a roughly circular order in a 2-dimensional space. The axes of the space are interpretable as the bipolar dimensions of pleasure–displeasure and arousal–sleepiness. In this study, teachers provided a set of emotion words they thought to be the emotion lexicon of their pupils; the interrelationships among these emotion concepts were explored in 4 studies with 677 3rd–7th graders and 34 undergraduates: 2 factor-analytic studies of self-report data and 2 multidimensional-scaling studies of similarity data. All 4 studies supported the hypothesized circular ordering of emotion words within a 2-dimensional space and the interpretation of the dimensions as pleasure and arousal. The 2-dimensional structure accounted for the data of 3rd graders, almost as well as it did for college students; there were no age differences in the salience of either of the 2 dimensions. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex differences in cerebral organization for speech and praxic functions.

A retrospective study on incidence of aphasia and apraxia was done on 143 male (mean age 50.4 yrs) and 73 female (mean age 45.7 yrs) right-handed patients with unilateral lesions of the left cerebral hemisphere and on a subgroup of 81 patients with damage restricted to anterior or posterior regions. Aphasia was proportionally more frequent in males than in females, but this difference was significant only in the larger sample. Moreover, the pattern of speech representation differed between the sexes: Speech disorders and manual apraxia occurred in females more often from damage to the anterior part of the left hemisphere than from posterior damage. This was not true for males. In the 169 Ss with unilateral right-hemisphere damage, the incidence of aphasia was extremely low and did not differentiate the sexes. It is concluded that there are sex differences in the organization of speech and praxis within the left hemisphere and that speech is not simply more bilaterally organized in females than males. (French abstract) (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Societal reactions to a child's death by suicide.

80 14–67 yr olds responded to newspaper accounts of a 10-yr-old girl who died either from a bone marrow disease, an automobile accident, a drug overdose, or by hanging. The child and her family were perceived as most disturbed and her parents as most blameworthy in the case of suicide. Results are consistent with the view that parents of children who kill themselves experience stress from external sources as well as internal grief. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Values destroyed by death.

It was hypothesized that people who valued themselves highly (high self-esteem) should fear death more than those who do not, and what these people should fear most about death is the cessation of those activities in which they are greatly involved. These attitudes towards death should vary with such demographic variables as age, sex, social class, religion, and marital status. The data support the hypotheses. From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4HJ05D. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and single versus multiple cues in source monitoring.

Participants heard words said by 2 speakers and later decided who said each word. The authors varied the perceptual distinctiveness of the speakers and the distinctiveness of the cognitive operations participants performed on the words. Relative to younger adults, older adults had significantly lower source monitoring scores when perceptual or cognitive operations conditions were similar but not when either cue was more distinctive. Combining cues did not affect source monitoring of younger adults but hurt older adults' performance relative to the distinctive perceptual condition. Evidently, older adults generate cognitive cues at the expense of encoding perceptual cues; any deficit in binding perceptual and semantic information disadvantages them more in source monitoring than in old/new recognition. There was no correlation between neuropsychological tests assessing frontal function and source monitoring in older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)