Date of Award

1999

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Brian Bornstein

Abstract

Only one prior experiment has examined the effect of revelation on situational frequency judgments (Exp. 3, Greene, 1996). In the current study, three experiments examined the effect of revelation on frequency estimation. Experiment 1A and 1B replicated and extended the study done by Greene (1996) by increasing the frequencies of study items from one to eight in both a random (1A) and blocked (1B) design. Experiment 2 examined the relation between the frequency of study items and the degree of distortion of the items revealed at test. A significant effect of revelation was found across frequencies for the three revealed conditions compared to an intact condition. Experiment 3 examined the effect of familiarity within a frequency estimation task. A significant revelation effect was found across frequencies despite the fact that the word that was revealed was different from the word that was being judged for frequency. This series of experiments showed a robust effect of revelation on frequency estimation. The finding that frequency estimation is affected by manipulations that occur only at retrieval poses a problem for a strict automatic explanation for frequency encoding. Theories of frequency estimation involving retrieval are discussed.

ISBN

9780599372627

Pages

86

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_disstheses.6953

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