The bias for a recognition judgement depends on the response emitted in a prior recognition judgement

Abstract

On each trial of the experimental procedure the participant read a list of words and made successive recognition judgements to multiple test words. The bias for a given recognition judgement was more conservative if the judgement followed a correct positive response to a target than if it followed a correct negative response to a lure. Similar results were not observed for successive semantic recognition judgements. The bias shift was greater when the study list was short than when the list was long. The results suggest that participants in a recognition task have a sense of the size of the set of targets that might possibly be presented on the next trial and that, under conditions in which a word can only be presented once during the test phase, their bias becomes more conservative after a positive response to a target because the set is depleted.

Keywords:

• Recognition
• Response bias
• Sequential effects

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by NIH grant MH 66189. We thank Tim Perfect, Mathew Rhodes, and an anonymous reviewer for suggesting Experiments 2 and 3.

Notes

¹We could, in principle, have ignored whether the participant responded correctly to the preceding word, and simply examined performance as a function of the participant's response to the preceding word. We have found, however, that participants sometimes report being aware of having made an error upon responding incorrectly. Thus, when the participant responded incorrectly to the preceding word, the participant's response may not have accurately reflected the participant's sense of the preceding word's list status.

²We observed parallel results in the response-time data. That is, the effects of Preceding Word and Test Word interacted in these data; when the test word was a target, response time was longer when the preceding word was a target than when the preceding word was a lure; when the test word was a lure, response time was longer when the preceding word was a lure than when the preceding word was a target. We observed a similar pattern in the first generalising experiment for Experiment 1. There were no significant effects in the response-time data for the second generalising experiment for Experiment 1, or in Experiments 2 or 3. Further information regarding the response time analyses is available from the authors.

³Seeing this shrinkage is distinct from seeing the members of the set as being unavailable consequent to previous presentation, which is what is predicted under the set depletion hypothesis. For example, some participants may have seen the 32-element set as remaining the same size throughout the test phase, and seen each set member that was presented throughout the test phase as reducing the number of candidates for future presentation by 1/32, with the result that the bias shift remained constant in size for these participants throughout the test phase. Alternatively, some participants may have seen the set as shrinking; for example, the participants may have seen the set as being reduced in size from 32 to 16 during the second half of the test phase. In this case, whereas the participants saw each set member that was presented during the first half of the test phase as reducing the number of candidates for future presentation by 1/32, the participants would have seen each member that was presented during the second half as reducing the number of future candidates by 1/16, with the result that the bias shift would have been larger for these participants during the second than the first half of the test phase.