Are judgments of the positional frequencies of letters systematically biased due to availability?

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 754-770

  Sedlmeier, Peter ^a   Hertwig, Ralph ^b,c   Gigerenzer, Gerd ^b,c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PADERBORN   (Germany)

^b MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN COGNITIVE AND BRAIN SCIENCES   (Germany)

^c MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0032386442     PISSN: 02787393     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.24.3.754     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Attneave, F. (1953). Psychological probability as a function of experienced frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 46, 81-86.
2. Barsalou, L. W. (1992). Cognitive psychology: An overview for cognitive scientists. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
3. Brunswik, E. (1955). Representative design and probabilistic theory in a functional psychology. Psychological Review, 62, 193-217.
4. Cohen, J. (1992). A power primer. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 155-159.
5. Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition, 58, 1-73.
6. Estes, W. K. (1991). Cognitive architectures from the standpoint of an experimental psychologist. Annual Review of Psychology, 42, 1-28.
7. Fiedler, K. (1983). On the testability of the availability heuristic. In R. W. Scholz (Ed.), Decision making under uncertainty (pp. 109-119). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
8. Fiedler, K. (1988). The dependence of the conjunction fallacy on subtle linguistic factors. Psychological Research, 50, 123-129.
9. Gigerenzer, G. (1994). Why the distinction between single-event probabilities and frequencies is important for psychology (and vice versa). In G. Wright & P. Ayton (Eds.), Subjective probability (pp. 129-162). New York: Wiley.
10. Gigerenzer, G. (1996a). On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky (1996). Psychological Review, 103, 592-596.
11. Gigerenzer, G. (1996b). The psychology of good judgment: Frequency formats and simple algorithms. Journal of Medical Decision Making, 16, 273-280.
12. Gigerenzer, G., Hell, W, & Blank, H. (1988). Presentation and content: The use of base rates as a continuous variable. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14, 513-525.
13. Gigerenzer, G., & Hoffrage, U. (1995). How to improve Bayesian reasoning without instruction: Frequency formats. Psychological Review, 102, 684-704.
14. Gigerenzer, G., Hoffrage, U., & Kleinbölting, H. (1991). Probabilistic mental models: A Brunswikian theory of confidence. Psychological Review, 98, 506-528.
15. Gigerenzer, G., Swijtink, Z., Porter, T., Daston, L., Beatty, J., & Krüger, L. (1989). The empire of chance: How probability changed science and everyday life. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
16. Greene, R. L. (1984). Incidental learning of event frequencies. Memory & Cognition, 12, 90-95.
17. Greene, R. L. (1989). Negative practice effects on frequency discrimination. American Journal of Psychology, 102, 225-232.
18. Grossberg, S. (1976). Adaptive pattern classification and universal recoding: I. Parallel development and coding of neural feature detectors. Biological Cybernetics, 23, 121-134.
19. Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. T. (1979). Automatic and effortful processes in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 108, 356-388.
20. Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. T. (1984). Automatic processing of fundamental information: The case of frequency of occurrence. American Psychologist, 39, 1372-1388.
21. Hertwig, R. (1995). Why Dr. Gould's homunculus doesn't think like Dr. Gould: The "conjunction fallacy" reconsidered. Konstanz, Germany: Hartung-Gorre.
22. Hertwig, R., & Gigerenzer, G. (1997). The "conjunction fallacy" revisited: How intelligent inferences look like reasoning errors. Manuscript submitted for publication.
23. Hintzman, D. L. (1969). Apparent frequency as a function of frequency and the spacing of repetitions. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 80, 139-145.
24. Hintzman, D. L. (1984). MINERVA 2: A simulation model of human memory. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 16, 96-101.
25. Hintzman, D. L. (1988). Judgments of frequency and recognition memory in a multiple-trace memory model. Psychological Review, 95, 528-551.
26. Hock, H. S., Malcus, L., & Hasher, L. (1986). Frequency discrimination: Assessing global-level and element-level units in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12, 232-240.
27. Hoffrage, U., & Gigerenzer, G. (1996). The impact of information representation on Bayesian reasoning. In G. Cottrell (Ed.), Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 126-130). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
28. Hume, D. (1975). A treatise of human nature. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. (Original work published 1739).
29. Institut für deutsche Sprache. (1968, December). Forschungsberichte des Instituts für deutsche Sprache, Band 2. Mannheim, Germany: Institut für deutsche Sprache.
30. Institut für deutsche Sprache. (1969, April). Forschungsberichte des Instituts für deutsche Sprache, Band 3. Mannheim, Germany: Institut für deutsche Sprache.
31. Johnson, M. K., Peterson, M. A., Yap, E. C., & Rose, P. M. (1989). Frequency judgments: The problem of defining a perceptual event. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 126-136.
32. Jonides, J., & Jones, C. M. (1992). Direct coding for frequency of occurrence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18, 368-378.
33. Juslin, P., Hoffrage, U., & Gigerenzer, G. (1997). Connecting minds to environments: A neo-Brunswikian approach to judgment and decision making. Unpublished manuscript.
34. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1996). On the reality of cognitive illusions. Psychological Review. 103, 582-591.
35. Lopes, L. L., & Oden, G. D. (1991). The rationality of intelligence. In E. Eels & T. Maruszewski (Eds.), Poznan studies in the philosophy of the sciences and the humanities (Vol. 21, pp. 225-249). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
36. May, R. S. (1987). Realismus von subjectiven Wahrscheinlichkeiten: Eine kognitionspsychologische Analyse inferentieller Prozesse beim Over-confidence Phänomen [Calibration of subjective probabilities: A cognitive analysis of inference processes in overconfidence]. Frankfurt, Germany: Lang.
37. Mayer, R. E. (1992). Thinking, problem solving, cognition (2nd ed.). New York: Freeman.
38. Mayzner, M. S., & Tresselt, M. E. (1965). Tables of single-letter and bigram frequency counts for various word-length and letter-position combinations. Psychonomic Monograph Supplements, 1, 13-32.
39. Naveh-Benjamin, M., & Jonides, J. (1986). On the automaticity of frequency coding: Effects of competing task load, encoding strategy, and intention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12, 378-386.
40. Reeves, R., & Lockhart, R. (1993). Distributional versus singular approaches to probability and errors in probabilistic reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 207-226.
41. Rosenthal, R., & Rosnow, R. L. (1985). Contrast analysis: Focused comparisons in the analysis of variance. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
42. Rosenthal, R., & Rosnow, R. L. (1991). Essentials of behavioral research: Methods and data analysis (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
43. Rosnow, R. L., & Rosenthal, R. (1996). Contrasts and interactions redux: Five easy pieces. Psychological Science, 7, 253-257.
44. Rumelhart, D. E., & Zipser, D. (1985). Feature discovery by competitive learning. Cognitive Science, 9, 75-112.
45. Schwarz, N., Bless, H., Strack, F., Klumpp, G., Rittenauer-Schatka, H., & Simons, A. (1991). Ease of retrieval as information: Another look at the availability heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 195-202.
46. Sedlmeier, P. (1997a). BasicBayes: A tutor system for simple Bayesian inference. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 29, 328-336.
47. Sedlmeier, P. (1997b). How to improve statistical thinking: Choose the task representation wisely and learn by doing. Manuscript submitted for publication.
48. Sedlmeier, P., & Gigerenzer, G. (1996). Teaching Bayesian reasoning in less than two hours. Manuscript submitted for publication.
49. Sedlmeier, P., Hertwig, R., & Gigerenzer, G. (1995, August). Encoding and representing relative letter frequencies: From availability to connections strengths. Paper presented at the 15th Biannual Conference on Subjective Probability, Utility, and Decision Making, Jerusalem, Israel.
50. Shanks, D. R. (1995). Is human learning rational? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 48(A), 257-279.
51. Sniezek, J. A., & Buckley, T. (1993). Decision errors made by individuals and groups. In N. J. Castellan (Ed.), Individual and group decision making. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
52. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5, 207-232.
53. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983). Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293-315.
54. Varey, C. A., Mellers, B. A., & Birnbaum, M. H. (1990). Judgments of proportions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16, 613-625.
55. Wänke, M., Schwarz, N., & Bless, H. (1995). The availability heuristic revisited: Experienced ease of retrieval in mundane frequency judgments. Acta Psychologica, 89, 83-90.
56. Watkins, M. J., & LeCompte, D. (1991). Inadequacy of recall as a basis for frequency knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 17, 1161-1176.
57. White, P. A. (1985). The availability heuristic and retrieval strategies in judgments of letter frequency. Unpublished manuscript, University of Auckland.
58. White, P. A. (1991). Availability heuristic and judgments of letter frequency. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 72, 34.
59. Wimmer, H., & Hummer, P. (1990). How German-speaking first graders read and spell: Doubts on the importance of the logographic stage. Applied Psycholinguistics, 11, 349-368.
60. Winer, B. J. (1971). Statistical principles in experimental design (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.