Collins & Loftus, 1975), wherein links in memory are not organized hierarchically but by importance instead. Posner's letter matching studies In the late 1960s, Michael Posner developed a series of letter-matching studies to measure the mental processing time of several tasks associated with recognition of a pair of letters. The simplest task was the physical match task, in which subjects were shown a pair of letters and had to identify whether the two letters were physically identical or not. The next task was the name match task where subjects had to identify whether two letters had the same name. The task involving the most cognitive processes was the rule match task in which subjects had to determine whether the two letters presented both were vowels or not vowels. The physical match task was the most simple; subjects had to encode the letters, compare them to each other, and make a decision. When doing the name match task subjects were forced to add a cognitive step before making a decision: they had to search memory for the names of the letters, and then compare those before deciding. In the rule based task they had to also categorize the letters as either vowels or consonants before making their choice. The time taken to perform the rule match task was longer than the name match task which was longer than the physical match task. Using the subtraction method experimenters were able to determine the approximate amount of time that it took for subjects to perform each of the cognitive processes associated with each of these tasks. Reaction time as a function of individual differences Differential psychologists frequently investigate the causes and consequences of information processing modeled by chronometric studies from experimental psychology. While traditional experimental studies of RT are conducted within-subjects with RT as a dependent measure affected by experimental manipulations, a differential psychologist studying RT will typically hold conditions constant to ascertain between-subjects variability in RT and its relationships with other psychological variables. Cognitive ability Researchers spanning more than a century have generally reported medium-sized correlations between RT and measures of intelligence: There is thus a tendency for individuals with higher IQ to be faster on RT tests. Although its mechanistic underpinnings are still debated, the relationship between RT and cognitive ability today is as well-established an empirical fact as any phenomenon in psychology. A 2008 literature review on the mean correlation