Frequency Judgments Research Articles

Evidence for auditory temporal distinctiveness: Modality effects in order and frequency judgments.

Two new, long-lasting phenomena involving modality of stimulus presentation are documented. In one series of experiments we investigated effects of modality of presentation on order judgments. Order judgments for auditory words were more accurate than order judgments for visual words at both the beginning and the end of lists, and the auditory advantage increased with the temporal separation of the successive items. A second series of experiments investigated effects of modality on estimates of presentation frequency. Frequency estimates of repeated auditory words exceeded frequency estimates of repeated visual words. The auditory advantage increased with frequency of presentation, and this advantage was not affected by the retention interval. These various effects were taken as support for a temporal coding assumption, that auditory presentation produces a more accurate encoding of time of presentation than does visual presentation.

Generation effects in frequency judgment.

Generation effects in frequency judgment.

Evidence for auditory temporal distinctiveness: modality effects in order and frequency judgments.

Two new, long-lasting phenomena involving modality of stimulus presentation are documented. In one series of experiments we investigated effects of modality of presentation on order judgments. Order judgments for auditory words were more accurate than order judgments for visual words at both the beginning and the end of lists, and the auditory advantage increased with the temporal separation of the successive items. A second series of experiments investigated effects of modality on estimates of presentation frequency. Frequency estimates of repeated auditory words exceeded frequency estimates of repeated visual words. The auditory advantage increased with frequency of presentation, and this advantage was not affected by the retention interval. These various effects were taken as support for a temporal coding assumption, that auditory presentation produces a more accurate encoding of time of presentation than does visual presentation.

Frequency-of-occurrence memory over the adult lifespan.

As part of a large scale normative study involving a number of cognitive tasks, 233 subjects, all noncollege students ranging in age from 20 to 79 years, performed two frequency judgment tasks. A modest, but statistically significant, age-related deficit was found, with the decrement in proficiency being largest from middle to late adulthood.

Effects of level of processing and rehearsal on frequency judgments.

Effects of level of processing and rehearsal on frequency judgments.

Effects of level of processing and rehearsal on frequency judgments.

The effects of attention during encoding and rehearsal after initial encoding on frequency estimates were investigated in three experiments. Varying the level of processing affected the linear increase in frequency estimates as a function of actual frequency, but varying processing after encoding with remember or forget cues had the greatest effects on the intercept of the function relating judged to actual frequency. Deeper levels of processing improved performance in a frequency discrimination task, whereas remember and forget cues had only very small effects on performance. Materials that are easy to rehearse were compared with materials that are difficult to rehearse in Experiment 2. The results were interpreted as evidence against a covert rehearsal explanation of slope effects in frequency estimation tasks because materials that are difficult to rehearse tended to produce larger interactions between remember versus forget cues and frequency than materials that are easier to rehearse. In Experiment 3, an arithmetic task that was performed during word encoding affected the slope of the function relating judged to actual frequency, but the same task performed immediately after word presentation had no effect on frequency estimates. It was concluded that frequency is not stored automatically because attention during the initial stages of encoding affects it; however, attention devoted to processing after initial encoding does not affect the rate with which subjective frequency increases with repetitions.

Human learning and memory.

There have been several notable recent trends in the area of learning and memory. Problems with the episodic/semantic distinction have become more apparent, and new efforts have been made (exemplar models, distributed-memory models) to represent general knowledge without assuming a separate semantic system. Less emphasis is being placed on stable, prestored prototypes and more emphasis on a flexible memory system that provides the basis for a multitude of categories or frames of reference, derived on the spot as tasks demand. There is increasing acceptance of the idea that mental models are constructed and stored in memory in addition to, rather than instead of, memorial representations that are more closely tied to perceptions. This gives rise to questions concerning the conditions that permit inferences to be drawn and mental models to be constructed, and to questions concerning the similarities and differences in the nature of the representations in memory of perceived and generated information and in their functions. There has also been a swing from interest in deliberate strategies to interest in automatic, unconscious (even mechanistic!) processes, reflecting an appreciation that certain situations (e.g. recognition, frequency judgements, savings in indirect tasks, aspects of skill acquisition, etc) seem not to depend much on the products of strategic, effortful or reflective processes. There is a lively interest in relations among memory measures and attempts to characterize memory representations and/or processes that could give rise to dissociations among measures. Whether the pattern of results reflects the operation of functional subsystems of memory and, if so, what the "modules" are is far from clear. This issue has been fueled by work with amnesics and has contributed to a revival of interaction between researchers studying learning and memory in humans and those studying learning and memory in animals. Thus, neuroscience rivals computer science as a source of interdisciplinary stimulation. Research on topics such as memory for spatial location, the relation between memory and affect, and autobiographical memory reminds us that general theories of memory based on studies of verbal materials alone are limited. Investigating how people remember complex natural events should provide us with a larger set of memory phenomena to explain and consequently insight into a wider range of memory principles or a deeper understanding of the ones we already accept (e.g. the role of repetition, encoding specificity), including their functional significance for human behavior.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

When reality monitoring fails: The role of imagination in stereotype maintenance.

Research on reality monitoring (the process by which people distinguish memories of real events from memories of imagined events) suggests that the occurrence of imagined events can inflate the perceived frequency of corresponding real events. When the availability of real events is assessed, reality monitoring apparently fails to exclude some events that were only imagined. We conducted two experiments to examine how such failures in reality monitoring can contribute to the maintenance of social stereotypes. When subjects imagined members of occupational groups in the initial experiment, they tended to incorporate stereotyped traits into their imaginations, with specific traits determined by the contexts being imagined. This result suggests that imagined events do correspond with stereotype-confirming real events. In the second experiment, subjects read sentences that presented traits (stereotyped and nonstereotyped) in association with occupations with uniform frequency. They also imagined members of each occupation in situations relevant to particular stereotypic traits, but without presentation of the traits. In subsequent judgments of presentation frequency, subjects overestimated their exposure to stereotypic occupation-trait combinations, which replicated earlier studies. More important, subjects further overestimated the presentation frequency of imagined stereotypic combinations, which indicated the failure of subjects to distinguish their self-generated images from actual presentations. These results confirmed that stereotype-based imaginings can lead to inflated association of groups with their stereotypic traits. Such imaginal confirmation of social stereotypes may contribute to the self-perpetuating nature of these beliefs.

Event-frequency judgments as a function of the linguistic frequency and single or paired presentation of target words: II Task requiring judgment of linguistic frequency

A total of 80 college students in four classes rated a series of English words as high or low in linguistic frequency. Words high or low in linguistic frequency were presented 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4 times, singly or in mixed pairs. The students were then given a previously unannounced event-frequency test. The results implicated two major determinants of event-frequency judgments: (1) an item-strength factor and (2) multiple memory traces. Words high in linguistic frequency were given consistently higher event-frequency estimates, especially when they had been presented singly. Words low in linguistic frequency were more accurately judged for event frequency when they had been paired rather than singly presented; this result suggests the role of multiple memory traces because of the greater number of such traces with unique contextual cues available for retrieval at test in the paired condition. The results are compared with those earlier obtained with the same experimental materials and general procedure but a different cover task. Interpretation in terms of a dual-factor hypothesis for event-frequency judgment is discussed.

More retrospective reports on event-frequency judgments: Shift from multiple traces to strength factor with age

Analysis of retrospective reports by 371 students on how they had made event-frequency judgments during an experiment indicated that both retrieval of multiple traces and a strength factor were used in making the judgments. There were reliably different distributions of traces, strength, and other categorizations of the statements over the three grade levels tested (6th, 10th, and college freshman-sophomore). The number of traces reports did not change very much, whereas the strength reports increased substantially with age. Overall, there were reliably more strength than traces reports (98 to 62), supporting an earlier suggestion (Marx, 1985) that some kind of strength factor needs to be considered as a supplement to multiple traces in the explanation of how event frequency judgments are made.

Recognition and Frequency Judgments in Young and Elderly Adults

Three experiments examined frequency judgments and recognition memory in young and elderly adults. Subjects were presented a long list of words at either a 5-s rate (Experiments 1 & 3) or a 1-s rate (Experiment 2), after which frequency-judgment and recognition memory tasks were administered. Either an absolute (Experiments 1 & 2) or a relative (Experiment 3) frequency-judgment task was used. The recognition test, which involved repeated tests of some items, involved either one incorrect item paired with each correct item (Experiments 1 & 2), or four incorrect items (Experiment 3). Age-related differences in frequency judgments, for the more frequently presented items, were found in all three experiments. For the recognition scores, the predicted interaction between age and successive tests was found only in Experiment 3. The results were interpreted within the framework of age-related differences in elaborative encoding and in distractibility to irrelevant stimuli.

Frequency discrimination: assessing global-level and element-level units in memory.

Subjects' knowledge of how often various events occur was used to assess the retention of memory units for word-like strings of letters. A series of strings was presented at one of three exposure durations. Within the series, the frequencies of occurrence of different strings and of the letters composing the strings were varied orthogonally. At relatively long exposure durations, subjects could discriminate the frequency of occurrence for both strings and their constituent letters. The formation of global-level (string) memory units was indicated by judgments of string frequency being unaffected by either the frequencies of their component letters or experimental conditions (brief exposures) that prohibited accurate judgment of letter frequency. Although judgments of letter frequency were sometimes biased by the frequency of the strings containing the letters, the success with which the judgments discriminated different levels of letter frequency did not depend on the activation of string-level memory units. Furthermore, subjects' frequency judgments for letters were not predictable from their recall of the strings containing the letters. These results, which could not be explained by Tversky and Kahneman's (1973) "availability heuristic," provided evidence for the formation of element-level (letter) memory units. A converging experiment established that element-level frequency information could be abstracted from words as well as nonwords, and further, that this information was stored in long-term memory.

Regency and Frequency Judgements in Alcoholic Amnesics and Normal People with Poor Memory

Alcoholic amnesics have been reported to confuse when an event occurred with how frequently it occurred and conversely, how frequently something took place with when it happened. This lack of independence of recency and frequency judgements, shown by these amnesics (but not shown by normal people) has been interpreted as reflecting a selective amnesic failure in memory for contextual information; this failure, in turn, leading to poor recall and recognition memory. The effect is replicated on another group of Korsakoff patients and, by manipulations of retention intervals and of learning opportunity, it is also shown that normal people with memory that is as poor overall as that of amnesics still have specific contextual memory with which to make temporal judgements independently of frequency of presentation and (somewhat less obviously) frequency judgements independently of recency of presentation. The qualitative differences between amnesic and normal people cannot therefore be an artefact of testing generally poor memory in amnesics. While it is possible that the unavailability or inaccessibility of contextual information may cause amnesia, an alternative hypothesis, that poor contextual knowledge is an incidental feature in alcoholic amnesia (related to frontal lobe dysfunction), is also considered.

Effects of instructions, orienting task, and memory tests on memory for words and word frequency

Common words were presented to subjects who either rated them for pleasantness or estimated letter frequency. Words were presented with frequencies of 0, 1, 3, or 6; half of the subjects were instructed to attend to frequency, half were not. Frequency and memory tests were then given, with half of the subjects receiving each test type first. Memory was improved by semantic processing, greater presentation frequency, and additional exposure during frequency tests. Frequency judgments were accurate when tested first, but frequency discrimination declined drastically when frequency was tested second. Semantic processing produced more accurate relative frequency judgments. Data are discussed in terms of models of frequency judgment, and artifacts of different kinds of data analysis are noted.

The subjective dates of natural events in very-long-term memory

This research explores the problem of how people determine the time of public events, such as the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan or the Three-Mile Island accident. According to what here is called the accessibility principle, the subjective dates of these events depend in part on the amount that can be recalled about them: The more known, the more recent the event will seem. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate this effect when subjects estimate explicit dates for important news stories of the 1970s and 1980s. The same effect appears in Experiment 3 for subjects who rate the recency of less known events drawn from a single week. Accessibility also contributes to the amount of time needed to compare the subjective date of an event (e.g., the Jonestown suicides) to an explicitly presented date (e.g., November 1979), as shown in Experiment 4. The accessibility principle for time estimation can be conceived as one of a related group of retrieval-based inferences that plays a part in judgments of frequency and probability and judgments about the falsity of a putative fact.

Retrospective reports on frequency judgments

Two groups of college students were given an unexpected event-frequency test following the completion of a simple cognitive task (composing sentences from slide-presented words or estimating the linguistic frequency of the same words). All of the subjects were then asked to describe how they had gone about making the event-frequency judgments. The predominant trend in the retrospective reports of the subjects who had composed unique sentences supported a multiple-traces factor (counting of the individual sentences), whereas the predominant trend in the reports of the subjects who had estimated linguistic frequencies supported a strength factor (general impression, familiarity). A dual-factor hypothesis of frequency processing is suggested, with counting of memory traces operative mainly for the lower frequencies and the more highly differentiated traces, and some kind of strength factor operative mainly for the higher frequencies, for which counting becomes difficult, and the less clearly differentiated traces.

The effects of rehearsal on frequency coding

It has been claimed (e.g., Hasher & Zacks, 1979,1984) that encoding of frequency information is a result of an automatic process. This claim has been supported by experimentation that has included tests of several criteria suggested for the identification of automatic processes. The present experiment extends these tests to a case in which frequency judgments were obtained in a rehearsal task with massed presentation. In this task, frequency coding was very sensitive to strategy manipulation. In fact, in one condition there was no reliable evidence of any frequency coding. These results are at odds with the claim that frequency coding is automatic.

Memory for the frequency of sex-typed versus neutral behaviors: Implications for the maintenance of sex stereotypes

Research has indicated that existing stereotypic beliefs can produce systematic biases in the processing of information. Information which is consistent with stereotypic assumptions appears to be stored and/or retrieved with relative ease, leading to confirmatory biases in memory. The present study tested the hypothesis that behavior which is consistent with sex stereotypes would be judged to have occurred more frequently than nonsex-stereotypic behavior. Subjects were presented with a videotape consisting of behavioral episodes in which male and female actors engaged in sex-typed and neutral activities. Subjects then made frequency judgments and performed a recognition task. Although all activities were actually presented the same number of times, subjects' frequency estimates were significantly higher for sex-typed activity episodes. Implications for the maintenance of beliefs in sex stereotypes are discussed.

Visual Acuity of Infants and Young Children: Forced-Choice Preferential Looking Procedures

Traditional forced-choice preferential looking (FPL) procedures have been useful laboratory tools in the documentation of normal acuity development in infants and young children. FPL procedures have also been used in several clinical settings to assess acuity in infants and young children with a variety of visual disorders. Nevertheless, FPL procedures have limitations that may hinder clinical utility. The most serious problem is a statistical limitation that requires a large number of trials to produce a reasonably accurate estimate of acuity. Because of this limitation we developed the acuity card technique, a procedure that relies on an observer's subjective judgment of the highest spatial frequency grating an infant can detect during presentation of FPL-type stimuli. Results of initial studies indicate that the procedure is faster than and as accurate as FPL procedures in the laboratory setting. Tests of the clinical usefulness of the acuity card procedure are in progress.

Judgments of Category Frequency

Judgments of Category Frequency