[TenTec] Fw: The ARRL Letter, Vol 26, No 31 (Friday, August 3, 2007)

[JAMES HANLON]

Here's an interesting item from the ARRL Letter, Friday, August 3.

Jim, W8KGI


* Morse Code Study in Pennsylvania: A psychology professor at the
University of Pittsburgh is conducting a study involving short-term
memory and how it correlates to Morse code. Julie Fiez, the study's
principal investigator, said she got the idea of using Morse code in her
studies from a family member who is an Amateur Radio operator. She said
she liked the idea of using CW in her experiments to see how people
process audio tones. "Our interest is in verbal working memory," she
said, "which is the ability to keep 'on-line' for a short time,
information you can access later." Part 1 of the experiment is an
assessment of the participant's Morse proficiency. First, participants
will be asked to accurately copy sentences as they are presented in
Morse at three different rates (16, 19, and 25 words per minute). Then
they will be asked to listen to the entire Morse sentence and recall the
sentence from memory. Part two asks participants to recall lists of
letters from memory. The letters will either be in English or in Morse.
Participants will either hear the letters through headphones or see them
on a computer screen. The study will look for differences in memory
performance between Morse lists and English lists. The research study is
expected to continue through the fall. If you would like to participate,
please contact the research team via e-mail <morsestudy at hotmail.com<mailto:morsestudy at hotmail.com>>.
Thanks to Tom Mitchell, WY3H, and the Leader Times, part of the
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review family of newspapers, for some information