Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 2000-2005.

The present author was honored to serve as editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (JEP:HPP) for the 2000-2005 volumes, carrying on the work of his predecessors. Along with the happiness and pride he felt during his time as editor, he also experienced disquiet. He captures the source of the unease with an anecdote from when he was an independent researcher.

Does precrastination explain why some observers are suboptimal in a visual search task?

How do we decide where to search for a target? Optimal search relies on first considering the relative informational value of different locations and then executing eye movements to the best options. However, many participants consistently move their eyes to locations that can be easily ascertained to neither contain the target nor provide new information about the target's location. Here, we asked whether this suboptimal search behaviour represents a specific example of a general tendency towards precrastination: starting sub-goals of a task before they are needed, and in so doing, spending longer time on doing the task than is necessary.

Thinking on your feet: Anticipatory foot placements in repeated bimanual object displacements.

Effective handling of objects requires proper use of the hands. If the object handling is done while standing or walking, it also requires proper use of the feet. We asked how people position their feet to meet future and ongoing object-handling demands.

Do People Work Hard to Maintain Social Distance?

How far away from each other people sit or stand reveals much about their social proximity, but merely sitting or standing may not test the limits of social boundaries as much as collaborating on tasks requiring physical coordination. In this study, we asked university students to walk two abreast while carrying a long pipe from one end of a workspace to another. Hurdles in the workspace forced the dyads to decide whether to walk close together without stepping over the hurdles or walk farther apart, stepping over the hurdles.

Determining the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of mental and physical tasks.

How do people determine the relative difficulty of mental tasks and physical tasks, and how do they determine the preferred order of such tasks? Is it harder to make such decisions if 1 task is mainly mental and the other is mainly physical than if both tasks are the same kind? To address these questions, we conducted 3 experiments. In experiment 1 we asked participants to judge the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of mental tasks (math problems). In experiment 2 we asked participants to judge the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of physical tasks (moving a bucket back and forth).

Think then act, or act then think? Double-response reaction times shed light on decision dynamics in precrastination.

People often try to complete tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra effort-a phenomenon called (Rosenbaum et al., 2014). Because precrastination is so widespread-as in answering emails too quickly, submitting papers before they have been polished, or, on larger scales, convicting people in the rush to judgment, or even going to war in the rush for revenge-it is important to understand its basis.

Deciding what to do: Observations from a psycho-motor laboratory, including the discovery of pre-crastination.

A great deal of research has concerned choices of goods or services with different values receivable at various times. Temporal discounting - the magnification of values that can be obtained sooner rather than later - has proven to be immensely important in this regard. In the present article, we shift the focus from the receipt of goods or services to the performance of tasks.

Carrying groceries: More items in early trips than in later trips or the reverse? Implications for pre-crastination.

Returning home from the grocery store with a car full of groceries requires decisions about how many bags to carry when. If the decisions exemplify procrastination, people should carry more bags per trip in late trips than in early trips (putting the hard work off until later), but if the decisions exemplify the recently discovered phenomenon of pre-crastination (Rosenbaum et al. in Psychol Sci 25: 1487-1496, 2014), people should carry more bags per trip in early trips than in late trips (doing the hard work early).

What matters in making demand-based decisions: Time alone or difficulty too?

Which task is easier, doing arithmetic problems of specified form for some specified duration, or carrying a bucket of specified weight over some specified distance? If it is possible to choose between the "more cognitive" task and the "more physical" task, how are the difficulty levels of the tasks compared? We conducted two experiments in which participants chose the easier of two tasks, one that involved solving addition or multiplication problems (Experiment 1) or addition problems with different numbers of addends (Experiment 2) for varying amounts of time (in both experiments), and one that involved carrying a bucket of different weights over a fixed distance (in both experiments). We found that the probability of choosing to do the bucket task was higher when the bucket was empty than when it was weighted, and increased when the cognitive task was harder and its duration grew. We could account for the choice probabilities by mapping the independent variables onto one abstract variable, Φ.

Towards a common code for difficulty: Navigating a narrow gap is like memorizing an extra digit.

What makes a task hard or easy? The question seems easy, but answering it has been hard. The only consensus has been that, all else being equal, easy tasks can be performed by more individuals than hard tasks, and easy tasks are usually preferred over hard tasks. Feghhi and Rosenbaum (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45, 983-994, 2019) asked whether task difficulty might reflect a single amodal quantity.

The Ultimate Tool: The Body, Planning of Physical Actions, and the Role of Mental Imagery in Choosing Motor Acts.

The ultimate tool, it could be said, is the brain and body. Therefore, a way to understand tool use is to study the brain's control of the body. A more manageable aim is to use the tools of cognitive science to explore the planning of physical actions.

Does attention solve the "apples-and-oranges" problems of judging task difficulty and task order?

How do we compare the difficulty of different kinds of tasks, and how we do sequence tasks of different kinds when the basis for the ordering is the tasks' difficulty levels? The ability to do these things requires a common currency, but the identity of that currency, if it exists, is unknown. We hypothesized that people may believe that the time that attention is paid to tasks enables people to compare and sequence tasks of different kinds. To evaluate this hypothesis, we tested three groups of participants.

Effort avoidance is not simply error avoidance.

Little is known about how effort is represented for different kinds of tasks. Recently, we suggested that it would help to establish empirical benchmarks for this problem. Accordingly, Feghhi and Rosenbaum (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45:983-994, 2019) estimated how many additional digits to be memorized corresponded to navigating through a narrow gap versus a wide gap.

Does task sustainability provide a unified measure of subjective task difficulty?

What accounts for the subjective difficulty of a task? It is easy to suggest ad hoc measures, such as how many individuals can do the task, how long it takes them to do it, how likely they are to complete it, how much attention it requires, and so on. But having such ad hoc measures may miss the point that it is possible to judge the relative difficulty of different kinds of tasks, suggesting that there may be a common basis for judging task difficulty. If there is such a common basis, it might be used to compare the difficulties of different kinds of task.

Task order choices in cognitive and perceptual-motor tasks: The cognitive-load-reduction (CLEAR) hypothesis.

A core question in the study of the dynamics of cognition is how tasks are ordered. Given two tasks, neither of which is prerequisite for the other and neither of which brings a clearly greater reward, which task will be done first? Few studies have addressed this question, though recent work has suggested one possible answer, which we here call the cognitive-load-reduction (CLEAR) hypothesis. According to the CLEAR hypothesis, there is a strong drive to reduce cognitive load (to "clear one's mind").

Judging the subjective difficulty of different kinds of tasks.

People judge the relative difficulty of different kinds of tasks all the time, yet little is known about how they do so. We asked university students to choose between tasks that taxed perceptual-motor control and memorization to different degrees. Our participants decided whether to carry a box through a wide (81 cm) or narrow (36 cm) gap after memorizing six, seven, or eight digits.

Who is or was E. R. F. W. Crossman, the champion of the Power Law of Learning and the developer of an influential model of aiming?

It is unusual for very little to be known about a highly influential psychological scientist, but that is the case for the individual responsible for promoting one of the most influential laws of the field, the Power Law of Learning, as well as a seminal model of aiming performance. The individual, who published as E. R.

End-state comfort meets pre-crastination.

Research on motor planning has revealed two seemingly contradictory phenomena. One is the end-state comfort effect, the tendency to grasp objects in physically awkward ways for the sake of comfortable or easy-to-control final postures (Rosenbaum et al., Attention and Performance XIII: Motor representation and control, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1990).

The time for action is at hand.

The science of mental life and behavior has paid scant attention to the means by which mental life is translated into physical behavior. Why this is so was the topic of a 2005 American Psychologist article whose main title was "The Cinderella of Psychology." In the present article, we briefly review some of the reasons why motor control was relegated to the sidelines of psychology.

Which task will we choose first? Precrastination and cognitive load in task ordering.

Precrastination, as opposed to procrastination, is the tendency to embark on tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra physical effort. We examined the generality of this recently discovered phenomenon by extending the methods used to study it, mainly to test the hypothesis that precrastination is motivated by cognitive load reduction. Our participants picked up two objects and brought them back together.

How do reaching and walking costs affect movement path selection?

Although reaching and walking are commonly coordinated, their coordination has been little studied. We investigated decision-making related to reaching and walking in connection with a recently discovered phenomenon called pre-crastination-the tendency to expend extra effort in the service of hastening goal or sub-goal completion. In the earlier studies where pre-crastination was discovered, participants decided which of two buckets to carry to the end of a walkway, picking the bucket they thought was easier.

Potters Make Shorter Pots Under Conditions of Reduced Sensory Input.

Although people have made clay pots for millennia, little behavioral research has explored how they do so. We were specifically interested in potters' use of auditory, haptic, and visual feedback. We asked what would happen if one or two of these sources of feedback were removed and potters tried to create pots of a given height, stopping when they thought they had reached that height.

Starting or finishing sooner? Sequencing preferences in object transfer tasks.

When tasks are performed, other tasks are postponed, at least implicitly. Little is known about how task sequencing is determined. We examined task sequencing in object transfer tasks for which either task could easily or logically come before the other.

Planning Deficits in Children With Specific Language Impairment Are Reflected in Unnecessarily Awkward Grasps.

Purpose: Specific language impairment (SLI) affects many children, but its symptomatology is still being characterized. An emerging view, which challenges the notion that SLI is specific to language, is that SLI may actually reflect a domain-general deficit in procedural learning. We explored an extension of this hypothesis that a core deficit in SLI involves a domain-general problem in planning.