- foreground-background discrimination: identifying the drawn forms
included in a general perception context; - position in space: identifying flipped or rotated figures.
Clerical abilities
A clerk is “a person carrying out mainly administrative labour” (The Explanatory
Dictionary of the Romanian Language, 1998). This occupational cluster includes
administrators, secretaries, computer operators, archive workers, typists, cashiers, various
types of counsellors, other public or private administration staff (Occupational Profiles,
2002). Within these occupations, an essential characteristic is being able to work fast and
accurately with a documents, that is to identify significant details or mistakes in printed
materials and various categories of texts and tables.
The numerous tests used so far (e.g. General Clerical Test Battery, General Aptitude
Tests Battery, Minnesota Office Specialist Test, etc.) show that clerical abilities are
measured through tests that principally target the following aspects: perceptive abilities
applied to verbal and numeric materials (the capacity to correct spelling and editing
mistakes, insert a new element in a non-arbitrary series following a certain rule, check
whether two series of figures or numbers are identical or not), and mathematical calculus
aptitudes. These are sometimes doubled by tests that evaluate grammar and vocabulary
knowledge (e.g. following written instructions, understanding messages, orthography), as
well as some specific work tasks (e.g. using legal terminology, using office appliances,
general procedures of administrative work).
Reaction time
There is empirical data proving the significant weight that reaction speed has on
performance in various professions: driver, airline pilot, air traffic controller (Richard,
2002), policeman, martial arts instructor, stuntman (Lee et al., 2001), radio-TV
announcer, stenographer, typist (Sanders, 1998), etc.
Investigating the reaction speed, we actually evaluate cognitive abilities, especially
general intelligence. The concept of “reaction time” (RT) broadly signifies the time
elapsed between presenting the subject with a stimulus and the answer offered. Reaction
time represents one of the dependent variables most used in experimental psychology,
from the very beginning. The term is used both for indicating the time necessary for the
subject to respond to a specific task, and the experimental procedure itself. There are
several procedural versions of reaction time: simple reaction time, associative,
discriminative, decisional, memory-related, etc. Of these, for measurement of information
processing speed, we have selected the following three: simple reaction time (SRT),
choice reaction time (CRT), and memory accessing reaction time (MRT). The simple
reaction time test (SRT) indicates the time elapsed between the (visual, auditory)