Abstract
Six groups of 20 Ss made absolute judgments of seven auditory stimuli differing in loudness. The experimental treatments for each group involved systematic manipulation of relative stimulus frequency (RSF), prior information about RSF, and knowledge of results. Pollack & Boynton’s (1963) finding that identification performance was enhanced for the most frequently presented stimulus and depressed for adjacent stimuli was confirmed, but it was concluded that this finding resulted from a failure of Ss to match response frequency to the frequency of the most commonly presented stimulus even with knowledge of results and/or prior information about RSF. There was no evidence that increasing RSF resulted in more adequate learning of the most frequently presented stimulus.
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John, I.D. The role of unbalanced probabilities of occurrence in the identification of elementary auditory displays. Psychon Sci 22, 96–97 (1971). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03332512
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03332512