Welsh M C, Revilla V, Strongin D, Kepler M
Department of Psychology, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley 80639, USA.
Percept Mot Skills. 2000 Apr;90(2):562-72. doi: 10.2466/pms.2000.90.2.562.
Although it has been assumed that the Tower of Hanoi and Tower of London are more or less interchangeable tasks dependent on executive function, a series of studies in our laboratory have indicated substantial nonshared variance between the performances on the two tasks. The purpose of the present study was to examine how much methods of administration, such as number of trials per problem, contribute to this nonshared variance. A new one-trial version of the Tower of Hanoi was developed to be identical to the Tower of London in four procedural characteristics. The one-trial version of the Tower of Hanoi was administered to 39 normal adults along with the traditional Tower of Hanoi and the Tower of London-Revised in two test sessions 5-7 weeks apart. The correlations between the two tasks were in the same range as found previously with the traditional task, indicating that administration differences do not account for the nonshared variance between the tasks. A reliability analysis of the one-trial tasks showed poor internal consistency. Also, the internal consistency of the 6-trial tower was artificially inflated by aspects of the administration and scoring procedures. Moreover, this task exhibited a ceiling effect on repeated testing. These results suggest that it would be of value to redesign the one-trial Tower of Hanoi systematically to increase its reliability and, potentially, its validity as a measure of executive functions.
尽管人们一直认为汉诺塔任务和伦敦塔任务在很大程度上是依赖执行功能的可互换任务，但我们实验室的一系列研究表明，这两项任务的表现之间存在很大的非共享方差。本研究的目的是检验管理方法，如每个问题的试验次数，对这种非共享方差有多大影响。开发了一种新的汉诺塔单试验版本，使其在四个程序特征上与伦敦塔相同。在相隔5至7周的两次测试中，对39名正常成年人进行了汉诺塔单试验版本以及传统汉诺塔和修订版伦敦塔的测试。两项任务之间的相关性与之前使用传统任务时发现的相关性处于同一范围，这表明管理差异并不能解释任务之间的非共享方差。对单试验任务的可靠性分析显示内部一致性较差。此外，6次试验塔的内部一致性因管理和评分程序的某些方面而被人为夸大。而且，该任务在重复测试中表现出天花板效应。这些结果表明，系统地重新设计汉诺塔单试验版本以提高其可靠性，并有可能提高其作为执行功能测量方法的有效性，将是有价值的。
