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27-05-2024 | Research

Can an isolated middle-series item make a “Dent” in the bow-shaped serial-position curve of comparative judgments?

Auteurs: Jerwen Jou, Kaelyn G. Calma, Lucy A. Elizondo, Jesus A. Cruz, Sofia S. Moreno, Po-Yi Chen

Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research | Uitgave 5/2024

Abstract

Studies have shown that local (e.g., midseries) items’ specific properties, including being isolated from rest of the items, can generate a local distinctiveness effect, enhancing the memory performance for the local items in serial recall or absolute judgments. However, this has not been the case in relative (comparative) judgments. For the first time, the present study found a local distinctiveness effect in comparative judgments by using an opposite-gender name for the midseries item in an otherwise uniformly one-gender name serial list. The reasons for the previous studies’ failure to produce this effect in comparative judgments and the present study’s success in obtaining it were discussed. The implication of the finding for the item/order information opponent-process theories was also suggested.

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In Jou (2005) study, subjects learned a list 15 names of people who were ranked ordered in height. The middle item was coded “0”, the shorter half of the people on the list were coded as “-1”, “-2” to “-7”, and the taller half of the people coded as “ + 1”, “ + 2”, to “ + 7”. In an absolute recognition test (“was the name and number pairing correct?), the name coded as “0” produced the lowest response time in the middle, and the two end anchors the second lowest response times, yielding an “M” shaped curve. However, in a comparative judgment test, the serial position curve showed a perfect inverted U shape. The middle position did not gain any performance benefit.

We allowed a few extra subjects to participate to meet their course requirement needs. Due to exclusion of individuals failing the minimum performance criterion, the final number of subjects was very close to the number generated by the power analysis.

With 8 items, there were two middle terms (4th and 5th items). However, in the comparative judgments for the one-step split pairs, there were 7 pairs (1–2, 2–3, 3–4, 4–5, 5–6, 6–7, 7–8), thus with only one midseries term, the 4th pair.

We would like to clarify one issue here. That is, the order information measured in this study was not a temporal order, because the pairs of names and associated ranks were presented during learning in a random sequence with respect to the rank order in each round of learning, making the height ranking order independent of the temporal order.

The reason why we let subjects decide how many study rounds to perform before taking the test instead of setting a uniform number of study rounds for everyone was that we aimed at achieving a 90% minimum accuracy level and subjects varied widely in the number of study rounds needed to achieve 90% accuracy. Some could achieve that goal in a couple of rounds, some needed 7 or 8 rounds, and some even required 13 or 14 rounds. For the fast learners, any rounds beyond 2 was a waste of time; for the slow learners, 5 or 6 rounds still fell far short of the rounds they needed to achieve the 90% accuracy goal. Letting them decide how many rounds of learning to take to achieve a near-perfect performance seemed to be the best approach.

When a null test result or a significant effect had important theoretical implications, we conducted an additional analysis, the Bayesian analysis (Masson, 2011; van Doorn et al., 2021; Wagenmakers, 2007), to obtain a relative probability that the data provide evidence in favor of the alternative hypothesis as opposed to the null hypothesis (H1 versus H0). BF stands for the Bayesian Factor. The subscript “10” means the likelihood that H1 can be true relative to that of H0. The larger the BF10 is, the more strongly the data favor the H1. For example, 30–100 indicates very strong evidence, 10–30 strong evidence, 3–10 moderate evidence, 1–3 anecdotal evidence, with 1 indicating both hypotheses predicting the data equally well; reciprocally, 0.333–1.00 indicates anecdotal evidence, 0.100–0.333 moderate evidence, 0.033–0.100 strong evidence, 0.010–0.033 very strong evidence in favor of H0.

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Titel: Can an isolated middle-series item make a “Dent” in the bow-shaped serial-position curve of comparative judgments?
Auteurs: Jerwen Jou
Kaelyn G. Calma
Lucy A. Elizondo
Jesus A. Cruz
Sofia S. Moreno
Po-Yi Chen
Publicatiedatum: 27-05-2024
Uitgeverij: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Gepubliceerd in: Psychological Research / Uitgave 5/2024
Print ISSN: 0340-0727
Elektronisch ISSN: 1430-2772
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-024-01975-4

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