A Singular Lack of Incidental Learning

Abstract

MORE than 200 people have been asked to recall the positions of the letters on a telephone dial, including all the staff of the Applied Psychology Research Unit (APRU), and not one has succeeded in performing the task. 151 of these people were tested formally and will accordingly be termed “subjects”. The subjects were first given a sheet of paper on which were inscribed ten circles arranged in the pattern of the telephone dial and were requested to fill in the digits. Following this they were given a sheet with a further dial with the digits correctly inscribed. On this they were requested to fill in the letters. If, as many subjects claimed, they had no idea at all where the letters were, they were requested to guess, or, in the extreme, to design their own telephone dial. Finally, a recognition test was given comprising twelve dials which had either been popular responses in preliminary tests or seemed plausible. All but one of these were required to be eliminated. The subjects, mostly members of the APRU Subject Panel, were divided into two groups, the smaller group consisting of people who had recently lived in London or had employment as switchboard operators. This sub-group was supplemented by a group from Birmingham and constituted a sample of forty-five “experienced” subjects who frequently use the letters when making local or trunk calls. The “normal” group contained 106 subjects, forty-seven of whom had no telephone in their homes.