Looking behind: Turning cards in the selection task.

Wason's selection task requires that one imagine which of four cards, each of which has a letter on one side and a number on the other, one would have to turn over to determine whether a statement about the cards is true or false. For example, one might see four cards showing T, H, 6, and 4 and be asked to say which card or cards one would have to turn over to determine whether a statement in the form of If a card has T on one side, it has 4 on the other is true. In the great majority of experiments with this task no cards are actually turned.

John A. Swets (1928-2016).

This article memorializes John A. Swets (1928 -2016). Swets's scientific work included empirical experimentation, theory development, and practical applications.

Knowledge assessment: Squeezing information from multiple-choice testing.

Knowledge assessment via testing can be viewed from two vantage points: that of the test administrator and that of the test taker. From the administrator's perspective, the objective is to discover what an individual knows about a domain of interest. From that of the test taker, the challenge is to reveal what one knows.

Roles of human factors and ergonomics in meeting the challenge of terrorism.

Human factors and ergonomics research focuses on questions pertaining to the design of devices, systems, and procedures with the goal of making sure that they are well suited to human use and focuses on studies of the interaction of people with simple and complex systems and machines. Problem areas studied include the allocation of function to people and machines, person-system interface design, accident prevention, risk assessment, human performance under various types of stress, crisis management, search and rescue operations, decision aiding, the training and coordination of teams, and negotiation and conflict resolution, among many others. Much human factors and ergonomics work has been directed at responding to accidents (train wrecks, airplane crashes, nuclear plant mishaps) and natural disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes, floods).

Five down, Absquatulated: crossword puzzle clues to how the mind works.

Doing crossword puzzles is a popular pastime; no one knows how many people do them, but estimates go as high as 50 million or more in the United States alone. Success at crossword puzzles taxes several aspects of memory and cognition. The purpose of this article is to consider hints that crosswords provide and questions that they prompt regarding how the mind works.

On producing random binary sequences.

This experiment addressed the opinion prevailing among researchers that people are poor at producing random binary sequences. Participants tried to produce sets of sequences of outcomes of imaginary coin tosses that could not be distinguished statistically from sets expected from actual coin tossing. The results generally support the conclusion that people are not very good at this task, although the distributional properties of the sets of sequences produced are qualitatively similar to those expected of sets produced by a random process.

Are Social Scientists Harder on Their Colleagues Than Physical Scientists Were on Theirs in the Past? Commentary on Trafimow & Rice (2009).

Trafimow and Rice (2009; this issue) have written a thought-provoking article that addresses an important issue in a creative, informative, and engaging way. In a series of vignettes, the authors imagine how several of the better known developments of science might have fared if the manuscripts in which they were first described had been assessed according to the standards and predilections of current reviewers of manuscripts in the social sciences. In this commentary, I note points made by Trafimow and Rice with which I agree, mention some questions that the article raises that are important in my view, challenge the authors' assumption that contemporary social scientists generally treat the ideas of their colleagues more harshly than past physical scientists treated those of theirs, and express an opinion about the merits of the peer-review system as it currently functions in the social sciences.

The production and perception of randomness.

This article contains a discussion of the elusive nature of the concept of randomness, a review of findings from experiments with randomness production and randomness perception tasks, and a presentation of theoretical treatments of people's randomization capabilities and limitations. The importance of task instructions and the difficulty of interpreting results when instructions are vague or ambiguous are stressed. The widely held view that people are incapable of generating or recognizing randomness is shown to lack the strong experimental support that has sometimes been claimed for it.