Atkinson's Inverse-U Curve and the Missing Cognitive Variables
- 1 October 1984
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Psychological Reports
- Vol. 55 (2) , 403-412
- https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1984.55.2.403
Abstract
A 3 × 3 factorial design examined the effects of three degrees of feedback/feedforward (given before task performance) and three levels of objective probability of success on task performance. Subjective expectancy, personal goal, valence of winning a monetary prize, expectancy, and commitment to winning were measured as intervening variables. The experimental manipulations had no effect on performance. This and other replication failures indicate that Atkinson's widely cited 1958 finding of a curvilinear relationship between probability of success and performance is not very robust. However, three variables not included in his model, personal goal, valence and commitment, were significantly related to performance, with commitment showing the strongest relationship.This publication has 7 references indexed in Scilit:
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