Serial position effects in comparative judgments.

Abstract

Three studies examined the ubiquity of the bowed serial position effect in comparative judgments: the tendency for pairs of extreme magnitude to be discriminated more readily than pairs of intermediate magnitude. Although prior research has demonstrated that this effect occurs quite regularly in finite set experiments that repeatedly present a small number of items, there has been some ambiguity about the robustness of the bowed serial position effect in infinite set experiments, in which items are never repeated. Based on the extensive norms collected in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 demonstrated that a bowed serial position effect does in fact occur in a large infinite set experiment. The results of Experiment 3 indicate that this bowed serial position effect is not an artifact of our norms. The results are consistent with models that emphasize categorization of magnitudes and inconsistent with models that emphasize positional discriminability.

Episodic and semantic components of the compound-stimulus strategy in the explicit task-cuing procedure

“…A list of 640 target words was developed, drawn partially from Shoben, Cech, Schwanenflugel, and Sailor (1989) and supplemented by additional words chosen to complete the cells in the 2 ϫ 2 crossing of origin ϫ size tasks and to equate the cells in terms of word length and frequency. The word length ranged from 2 to 12 letters and averaged 6.46 and 6.25 for small and large items and 6.22 and 6.49 for living and nonliving items, respectively.…”

Evidencefor implicitscaling in comparative judgment

“…Even with modification, each model has difficulty accounting for other important findings in the literature. For example, the reference-point model predicts that the serial position function should be a monotonically increasing function, which is inconsistent with the finding that the serial position function is frequently "bowed" (Shoben et al, 1989).…”

“…The items were selected from the Shoben et al (1989) norms. Again, these norms guided the assignment of stimuli to serial positions.…”

“…Two contexts were created by adding either small or large filler items to a list of experimental items. Again, serial position or rank was established by equating serial position with rated magnitude in the Shoben et al (1989) norms. Experimental items were selected at each of seven levels of magnitude or serial position ( -7.9, -4.0, -2.06, .05, 1.93, 3.93, 8.15).…”

“…Finally, the application of Equation 3 provides a parsimonious account of the rating data in this experiment. Differences in the rated sizes of items have been widely utilized as an independent measure of symbolic distance because of their documented impact on RT in comparative judgment tasks (Banks & Flora, 1977;Paivio, 1975;Shoben et al, 1989). If it was assumed that the sole influence of the contextual manipulations was on a component of the decision process not identified in Equation 3, thena much more complicated account of the relationship between rated size and RT would have to be developed to account for the effects of contexts on the two tasks in this experiment.…”