Judgements of frequency with incidental learning

Rose, Robert James (1974) Judgements of frequency with incidental learning. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

Subjects were given a long list of words and required to carry out one of three tasks: (1) evaluate the "goodness" implied by a word; (2) code each word arithmetically according to the arbitrary values assigned to the vowels a, e, i, o, u, by the experimenter; (3) find a rhyme for each word. Within each list, the experimental words occurred 2, 3, or 5 times with spacings of 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 items between repetitions. In an unexpected judgment of frequency test given at the end of the initial task, it was found that the evaluation group had the highest mean judgment and was most accurate while the coding group had the lowest mean judgment. The rhyming group was not significantly different from the evaluation group on mean judgment of frequency nor from the coding group on accuracy. All double interactions among the 3 main factors were significant in the analysis of the judgment of frequency results. The effects of both presented frequency and spacing were least pronounced in the coding condition, while the frequency x spacing interaction was due to a more pronounced spacing effect at the frequency of 5 than at the two lower levels of frequency. -- The three groups differed among themselves in number of recognition errors, with the evaluation group making fewest errors and the coding group making most. The number of correct recognitions made by a subject correlated significantly with his judgment of frequency. The results require of any model for the memorial representation of event frequency that it include the effects of real frequency, level of processing, spacing, and the interactions among these. It is suggested that such a model would be of a multiple-process type with a concept of "derived strength" involved in the retrieval of information concerning event frequency and a concept of "list markers" involved in the effect of spacing.

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