NATURE OF EXERCISE:
Inspection Time is defined in the psychology literature as the speed of intake of information. It's measured by determining the shortest duration required by the user to make a discriminative judgment. Inspection Time is one of the few single information-processing indices that accounts for 20% or greater of intelligence test variance.
RELEVANCE TO EVERYDAY LIFE:
We can all appreciate the benefit of faster information intake. Once again, the driving analogy is the easiest and the one to which people can most easily relate. Just imagine how much safer you and the passengers in your vehicle would be if you could take in information such as the pedestrian in the crosswalk, the pothole, that other vehicle in your path just a split-second faster. But, let's also consider what this faster intake could do for you in athletics. How great an advantage would it be for you to pick up that 90 mph fastball or that 100 mph serve just a little sooner? How about the football quarterback who can pick up the pass rusher a little earlier? Or the point guard who finds his teammate cutting to the basket just a bit quicker?
INSTRUCTIONS:
A variation of a commonly used inspection time stimulus, often referred to as the pi figure, is presented. It has three parallel vertical lines, with one being longer than the other two. The three lines are joined at the top by a horizontal bar. Shortly after the presentation of the stimulus, it will be masked by a figure with thicker vertical lines of equal length. The purpose of this mask is to prevent the user from processing information that is available in iconic storage (a portion of memory that can hold visual information for approximately one-half of a second).
Your objective is to notice which vertical line is longest. If the left line is longest, press the LEFT ARROW key on your keyboard. If the right line is longest, press the RIGHT ARROW key on your keyboard. If the middle line is longest, press the LEFT and RIGHT ARROW keys on your keyboard simultaneously.
All trials in this exercise will be at an Inspection Time of 40 ms. Please note that Reaction Time plays only a minimal role in the scoring of this exercise. Runs with greater accuracy will always have higher scores than runs with lesser accuracy. Reaction Time will only serve as a tiebreaker in runs with identical accuracy.
You must respond correctly 20 times to complete the exercise.
