Instruction for Online Operation-Word Task


Thanks for taking this task. It consists of 60 trials. In every trial there is a pair of an arithmetic operation and a word.  e.g.

             (8 / 4) + 3 = 10     bone

First you will be shown the operation,

            (8 / 4) + 3 = 10

and you need to click the correct button (True or False) as fast as you can.

After you click the button, the word "bone" will appear for a while. Try to REMEMBER the word.

The operation-word pair will be repeated randomly between 2-6 times. For example:

             (8 / 4) + 3 = 10      bone
             (3 X 2) + 4 = 5      rose
             (4 / 1) + 0 = 4        pet

At the end of these 3 operation-word pairs, you will be asked to type in the 3 words in the right order they were shown, i.e. bone   rose    pet

No pen/paper or other tools are allowed in the test. Please DO NOT rehearse the words aloud at any point during the test. You will see your score at the end of the test, and this score will be automatically emailed to me. Please follow the instructions carefully, since otherwise your score will not will not adequately measure your working memory span.


You are suggested to:


If you are using 56K dialup, the task applet may take a while to load (about 1.5min), please be patient.


If you don't have Java runtime environment (JRE) installed in your machine, please go to : http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html. Note: You only need to download JRE, not SDK.