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Women undergraduate scientists at Mount Holyoke College are aiding Navy in Science experimentation. Carol Shawcross checks to see if the center arc length is half way between right and left arc. Eleanor Reed adn T. W. Reese, project director, check counter that gauges accuracy with which person judges number of times light flashes.
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Experimenters tabulate score as 25 subjects are tested. Indicators show instantly how many are pushing right or left hand buttons. Operaion is so fast results can be compiled almost immediately. Group has made some 200,000 tests.
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A machine, we're told, is only as good as the man who runs it. And working on that premise, undergraduates at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass., are cooperating with the Navy in experiments which will tell all about "the man behind the wheel." The tests, according to T. W. Reese, project director, will be valuable in discovering how people in everyday life arrive at estimates of things they see, without counting - the number of people in a crowd; planes overhead; or pills in a bottle. other tests include an estimate of dots of light flashed on a screen for a fith of a second[,] the relative sizes of circles and length of arc lights.
The student-scientists plan their experiments with the help of the faculty, and make their own apparatus. Tests are held in the auditorium where willing subjects recruited from the student body sit amid precision recording instruments and machines designed specifically for the tests.
More than 200,000 estimates have been completed by the group in two-and-a-half years of research and experiments.
People and Places, June 1949