Check if a given value is out of certain range

[Laura Creighton]

Actually, the fact that adults have more difficulty processing
negations is one of the earliest things proven experimentally
in experimental psychology.

Clark, H., & Chase, W. (1972). On the process of comparing sentences against pictures. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 472–517.

is one of the most heavily cited experiments in the field.

The question is _why_?

The early assumption was that the negation is conceptually more
difficult.  People think logically, and a negation is a harder
sentence to construct.

Recently, this idea has come to be questioned:
see
http://www.google.se/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB0QFjAAahUKEwisvv_6lKbIAhXo8XIKHX32BKE&url=http%3A%2F%2Flangcog.stanford.edu%2Fpapers_new%2Fnordmeyer-2015-underrev.pdf&usg=AFQjCNEaPmluLtZs6aeAHgnyCCLEDazJdg

which I shortened to:
http://bit.ly/1OOfK46

It seems that people tend to hear what they expect to hear, and that
effect overwhelms any 'this is harder to constuct logically' effect.

Also, the 'mouse is quicker' experiment was rather more nuanced than
you reported.  It seems when measuring 'what is faster' the cognitive
load is important.  Time seems to go faster when you are thinking
harder about something, than when you are not.  (i.e. how did my
coffee get cold?  I just started hacking on this thing?)  It seems
that mouse editing was less of a cognitive load than typing, for
the people studied, thus they reported that keyboard was faster,
when it wasn't for them.

But

the experiment was replicated among secretaries who had superior typing
skills (and used emacs a lot).  For a lot of them, moving text by mouse
was not faster than using keyboard macros.  But the limiting factor
seemed to be 'how hard did I have to think about it' -- if you move
things by keyboard macro without thinking, then you won't report that
it takes you time, and you won't accurately report how long it takes
to do the task.

Thus for this experiment, the conclusion was that people were a whole
lot better at telling 'how hard did this make me think' than 'how
long did it take me to do the job'.  

Also, when you changed the requirements to 'reformat text all day long'
a huge number of people could get a lot more work done using emacs than
using the mouse editor.

We ran  both of these experiemnts in the coputer graphics lab at the
University of Toronto as a joint csc/psych exp in the mid 1980s, and
our conclusion at the time was that, for 'all day long' sorts of
tasks what was most important was boredom.  Once the subject got
bored with the task, it took longer.

For me the experiment was wonderful for another reason.  The
University of Toronto has long believed that their secretaries weren't
intelligent enough to use emacs, and had gone to particular effort to
design an easier editor for them to use.  But the secretaries of
the Political Science department, who used to come down to the
department of Zoology (where I worked) to use our pdp-11/44 for
text formating, and me (the undergraduate they hired to help
Zoologists format their graduate theses prior to having them
phototypeset) for advice, once saw me fix a problem by writing an
emacs macro, and hauling their document into emacs and using it.

They were entranced.  And wondered if I could teach them how to do it.
I thought, fine enough, and so taught classes in how to use emacs to
about 6 of them for 3 nights a week one summer.

And it turned out that everybody, including one sweet lady whose powers
of reasoning was seriously sub par, learned how to use emacs.  She learned
mostly by rote, but she could do it.  And the first two weeks of learning
how to write macros was very hard.  I learned a lot about how not to
teach things in that class. :)  So a good bit of the problem was lack
of skill in the teacher.

But once we started on writing them for real life tasks they had, and
not useless contrived examples I came up with, it went a lot better.
And soon they were quite proficient, and Political Science had its own
set of common emacs macros.

I got a real understanding of how much 'retype it by hand, it is
faster' you do, if your normal rate of typing is 165 wpm or more.
Especially if you grew up with paper, not computers, where retyping it
was considered very normal ...

At any rate when I heard about this experiment I got the secretaries
to compete, for fun.  The secretaries with their own emacs macros beat
the heck out of everybody else at 'copying and moving text around',
which was, after all, something they did all of the time.

The researchers thought that this wasn't a fair test, as the playing
field was so far from level.  The secretaries thought they could
better their score if they had been given the task the night before --
as they would have designed an even better emacs macro.  And, of course,
if they had a lot of that particular task to do, they would have
'had Caroline write one and teach it to us', as was usual.

Which got people down to the heart of the matter.  People wanted to
measure keyboard vs mouse efficiency, but as far as the secretaries
were concerned any test done 'for fun' didn't measure up to their real
lives, where getting more throughput meant 'we don't have to work
overtime' and 'only one secretary works in the office Friday after
3:30 in case a professor needs something typed up in a hurry, the
rest of us go home early'.

They were fairly hostile to the idea of inflicting the mouse editor
on the university support staff, unless it came with emacs lisp built
in.  And there was considerable 'when you pry my emacs away from my
cold dead fingers' sentiment.

These days, I suspect, the Political Science professors at U of T
do their own typing.  The profession of typist seems to be nearly
extinct.  And voice-to-text is the next big thing.

But we already know that many people find talking for a long time
itself unpleasant and exhausting.  I like my email.  I hate listening
to voice messages.  But, should we all live long enough, will
listening to people become the only option?

Laura