Perceptual Organization in Task Performance

Models of job cognition have neglected the perceptual process by which units of task behavior are organized prior to making task judgments. Perceptual organization was examined in this study using an unobtrusive observational technique adapted from the psycholinguistic literature. In each of two experiments, the structure of a task was manipulated to vary the relationship between task behavior and feedback. These manipulations were found to be reflected in the measure of perceptual organization. In Experiment 2, perceptual organization was found also to correlate with higher order judgments about the task. The implications of these results for expanding models of job cognition to include perceptual processes are discussed.