Abstract
Character classification tasks and “same” “different” judgments of letter strings were examined with reference to major experimental findings and the models proposed to explain them. An experiment is reported which was designed to investigate similarities between these two paradigms. The subject’s task was to scan a display and decide whether all the items in the display belonged to a criterion set; the location of the items in the display was irrelevant to the decision. Two classes of model were considered. First, for models in which display encoding time increases as a function of the number of items on display, an exhaustive-memory/exhaustive-display model offered a reasonable explanation of the data. Second, for models in which display encoding time is a constant, examination of the data in terms of the hypothetical number of memory and display comparisons demanded by the task revealed that negative responses were lengthened relative to positive responses. A one-processor model which postulates an exhaustive-memory self-terminating display search followed by a rechecking process on those trials in which a negative outcome ensues satisfactorily explains the latency and serial position data.
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I. S. Sternberg.Scanning a persisting visual image versus a memorised list. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of The Eastern Psychological Association. 1967.
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This research was supported in part by a Science Research Council grant to Professor R. J. Audley. and by a grant to the second author from the Social Research Division of the London School of Economics.
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Howell, P., Stockdale, J.E. Memory and display search in binary classification reaction time. Perception & Psychophysics 18, 379–388 (1975). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03204109
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03204109