Direct coding for frequency of occurrence.

Jonides, John; Jones, Caren M.

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.18.2.368

Cited by 63 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 33 publications

(53 reference statements)

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“…Frequencies are fairly accurately and almost automatically monitored in humans and animals (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1996;Jonides & Jones, 1992). From this research it follows that physicians and lay people alike can understand risks better when the information is communicated in natural frequencies rather than in probabilities or percentages.…”

Section: Ppv = P(hiv)p(pos | Hiv) P(hiv)p(posmentioning

confidence: 87%

AIDS counselling for low-risk clients

Gigerenzer¹,

Hoffrage²,

Ebert³

1998

AIDS Care

141

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Abstract. Th is study addresses the counselling of heterosexual men with low-risk behaviour who, voluntarily or involuntarily, take a HIV test. If such a man tests positive, the chance that he is infected can be as low as 50%. We study what information counsellors communicate to clients concerning the meaning of a positive test and whether they communicate this information in a way the client can understand. To get realistic data, one of us visited as a client 20 public health centres in Germany to take 20 counselling sessions and HIV tests. A majority of the counsellors explained that false positives do not occur, and half of the counsellors told the client that if he tests positive, it is 100% certain that he is infected with the virus. Counsellors communicated numerical information in terms of probabilities rather than absolute frequencies, became confused, and were inconsistent. Based on experimental evidence, we propose a simple method that counsellors can learn to communicte risks in a more eff ective way.

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Section: Ppv = P(hiv)p(pos | Hiv) P(hiv)p(posmentioning

confidence: 87%

AIDS counselling for low-risk clients

Gigerenzer¹,

Hoffrage²,

Ebert³

1998

AIDS Care

141

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“…There was no evidence that JOFs were influenced by the spatial numerosities. In a related study, Jonides and Jones (1992) found that JOFs to quantitativewords (e.g. twins, quadrangle, couple, triplets) were less accurate than JOFs to control words, a result they attributed to direct coding of frequency of occurrence.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Similarity, global matching, and judgments of frequency

Hintzman

2001

Memory & Cognition

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retrieval cue does not isolate a specific memory trace, but rather activates many traces simultaneously, each to a degree depending on its similarity to the cue. The retrieved information is a scalar value (variously referred to as strength, familiarity, similarity, or echo intensity) that represents the sum of memory activation produced by the cue. Old-new recognition judgments are made relative to a criterion on the summed activation scale, and forced-choice recognition judgments are made by choosing the test alternative whose summed activation is the highest. Clark and Gronlund (1996) discuss some of the successes and failures of these models.One success of global-matching models has been in explaining the test-pair similarity effect-a phenomenon of forced-choice recognition. Consider two unrelated items, A and B, both of which are old with respect to the study list, and two new items, A¢ ( similar to A) and B¢ (similar to B). Two-alternative forced-choice performance is better on similar pairs such as A versus A¢ than it is on dissimilar pairs such as A versus B¢. In the first case, the lure is related to the old test item with which it is paired, and in the second case, it is related to an old item that is not part of the same test pair. The test-pair similarity effect has been found in experiments manipulating the orthographic similarity of words (Hall, 1979), the semantic similarity of words (Hintzman, 1988), and the visual similarity of photographs (Tulving, 1981). An exception is that the opposite effect-a similar-pair disadvantage-occurs in associative recognition (Clark, Hori, & Callan, 1993).The test-pair similarity prediction derives from a fundamental property of global matching models, which is that correlated inputs or cues produce correlated outputs. Because cues A and A¢ are similar, they tend to activate the same subset of memory traces, prominently including the trace of A itself. Thus, if A produces summed activation that is relatively high for an old test item, A¢ will tend to cause activation that is relatively high for a new item. If A produces activation that is low for an old item, A¢ is likely to produce activation that is low for a new item. No such correlation is predicted for the unrelated test pair, A versus B¢.The choice between an old test item and a new test item is made by selecting the item with the higher summed activation; thus the probability of an error is P[(X 2 Y ) < 0], where X is activation caused by the old item, and Y is activation caused by the new item. In the simplest model, the old-and new-item means ( μ X and μ Y ) and variances (s 2 X and s 2 Y ) are assumed to be unaffected by the type of test pairing. Thus, P[(X 2 Y ) < 0] increases as a direct function of the variance of the differences, X 2 Y:where r XY is the Pearson correlation relating X and Y. When the old item is A and the new item is B¢, r is zero and the error rate is at its maximum. When the old item is A and the new item is A¢, r is positive and the error rate is reduced. To see intuitively why thi...

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“…Regardless of its processes, however, information encoding appears to result in highly accurate frequency estimates. As Jonides and Jones (1992) put it, "Ask about the relative numbers of many kinds of events, and you are likely to get answers that reflect the actual relative frequencies of the events with great fidelity" (p. 368; see also Zacks & Hasher, 2002, p. 27). Using their conclusion as a starting point, we now present two mechanisms of how people could make risk judgments on the basis of directly encoded frequency information.…”

Section: Direct Encodingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Judgments of Risk Frequencies: Tests of Possible Cognitive Mechanisms.

Hertwig

Pachur

Kurzenhäuser

2005

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

146

144

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How do people judge which of 2 risks claims more lives per year? The authors specified 4 candidate mechanisms and tested them against people's judgments in 3 risk environments. Two mechanisms, availability by recall and regressed frequency, conformed best to people's choices. The same mechanisms also accounted well for the mapping accuracy of estimates of absolute risk frequencies. Their nearly indistinguishable level of performance is remarkable given their different assumptions about the underlying cognitive processes and the fact that they give rise to different expectations regarding the accuracy of people's inferences. The authors discuss this seeming paradox, the lack of impact of financial incentives on judgmental accuracy, and the dominant interpretation of inaccurate inferences in terms of biased information processing.

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Direct coding for frequency of occurrence.

Cited by 63 publications

References 33 publications

AIDS counselling for low-risk clients

AIDS counselling for low-risk clients

Similarity, global matching, and judgments of frequency

Judgments of Risk Frequencies: Tests of Possible Cognitive Mechanisms.

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