This note describes a laboratory experiment made to follow up the indications of a previous scale experiment which showed that although car drivers reduced speed more when required to drive through gaps which looked more dangerous, a corresponding decrease in the errors they made did not occur. In the present experiment four male and four female subjects took part in a tapping task in shish the number of correct hits made in turn on two target plates set 16 inches apart and the number of errors were counted during a period of 18 seconds. The width of the target plates was varied. The logarithm of the target width was found to be significantly correlated with the tapping speed and the percentage of errors made. The correlation between tapping speed and the percentage of errors was not significant. During half the trials the subjects were warned that they would receive an electric shock whenever an error was made. During these trials the speed of tapping was significantly reduced but this was not accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the percentage of errors made.
Abstract