Abstract
There are many psychological tasks that involve the pairing of binary variables. The various tasks used often address different questions and are motivated by different theoretical issues and traditions. Upon closer examination, however, the tasks are remarkably similar in structure. In the present paper, we examine two such tasks, the contingency judgment task and the signal detection task, and we apply a signal detection analysis to contingency judgment data. We suggest that the signal detection analysis provides a novel interpretation of a well-established but poorly understood phenomenon of contingency judgments-the outcome-density effect.
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The preparation of this paper was supported by research grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to L.G.A. and S.S., by a grant from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse to S.S., and by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Graduate Scholarship to J.M.T. We acknowledge the help provided by Thomas Wickens with regard to fitting ROCs to our data, and we thank Ralph Miller and John Wixted for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Allan, L.G., Siegel, S. & Tangen, J.M. A signal detection analysis of contingency data. Learning & Behavior 33, 250–263 (2005). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196067
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196067