THE SPIRAL MAZE

Abstract

The writer discusses previous work on the use of psychomotor tests in the discrimination between normal subjects and subjects who are maladjusted or delinquent. A new test, the Spiral Maze, is described. Details of two experiments using the Spiral Maze are described: ( a ) contrasting a group of 22 young delinquent boys with 39 normal controls; and ( b ) testing 234 normal schoolboys aged 8–9 for whom teachers' ratings on ‘naughtiness’ were available. It was found that: (i) the delinquent group were significantly different in their preference for speed at the expense of accuracy; (ii) there was a significant relationship between psychomotor scores and the categories of ‘naughty’, ‘average’ and ‘good’ which were derived from the teachers' behavioural ratings; (iii) although, as expected, ‘naughty’ boys predominated in the group which was quick and careless, this ‘naughty’ category also predominated in the slow and careless group. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.