Primacy or recency effects in forming inductive categories

Duffy, Sean; Crawford, L. Elizabeth

doi:10.3758/mc.36.3.567

Cited by 20 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…In such situations, it may be more adaptive to ignore information learned early in the process of category induction and rely more on information about more recent stimuli. Such "criterion shifts" in distributions may be an important direction for future research on estimation (Brown & Steyvers, 2005;Duffy & Crawford, 2008).…”

Section: Additional Analyses Of Experiments 1 In Relation To Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Category effects on stimulus estimation: Shifting and skewed frequency distributions

Duffy

Huttenlocher

Hedges

et al. 2010

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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224This article explores a well-known finding in the memory literature: that estimates of categorized stimuli are often remembered as being more typical members of their categories than they actually are. Known variously as the central tendency bias or schema effect, this phenomenon has been described by several psychologists as perceptual or memory distortions (Bartlett, 1932;Estes, 1997;Hollingworth, 1910;Poulton, 1979). Alternatively, Huttenlocher and colleagues (e.g., Crawford, Huttenlocher, & Engebretson, 2000;Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Vevea, 2000) have proposed a rational basis for these effects. They argued that this bias arises from an adaptive Bayesian process that improves accuracy in estimation. The category adjustment model (CAM) proposes that stimuli are encoded at two levels of detail: as members of a category, and as fine-grain values. In reconstructing stimuli, people combine information from both category and fine-grain levels of detail. This combination results in estimates adjusted toward the central region of their categories. This adjustment reduces the mean square error of estimates at any given stimulus value enough to more than compensate for the bias introduced into individual estimates (Huttenlocher et al., 2000, p. 240).In their model, a category is a bounded range of stimulus values that vary along a stimulus dimension, such as size, weight, or intelligence. Memory for a stimulus is a fine-grain value along a dimension, such as a specific person's height. If the remembered value is inexact, the model proposes that the estimate (R) of the stimulus is a weighted combination of a category's central value ( ) and the inexact fine-grain memory (M ) for a particular stimulus. The weight given to the fine-grain and category levels varies as a function of the dispersion of the category ( 2 ) and the degree of inexactness surrounding the fine-grain memory ( 2 M ) and is derived from Bayes's theorem. To illustrate the Bayesian principle underlying the model, consider the example in Figure 1. The figure depicts a category with a normal frequency distribution of instances that varies along a continuous dimension. If a fine-grain memory for a stimulus falls at value M, and there is uncertainty surrounding the stimulus's true value, it is more likely that the stimulus's true value is in Direction A (toward the direction where the majority of instances fall) than in Direction B (where there are fewer instances). The combination of information about the prior distribution with the present distribution of inexactness surrounding the true value for M results in biased estimates that are more likely to fall in Region A than in Region B. The category adjustment model (CAM) proposes that estimates of inexactly remembered stimuli are adjusted toward the central value of the category of which the stimuli are members. Adjusting estimates toward the average value of all category instances, properly weighted for memory uncertainty, maximizes the average accuracy of estimates. Thus far, the CAM has been tested o...

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Section: Additional Analyses Of Experiments 1 In Relation To Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Category effects on stimulus estimation: Shifting and skewed frequency distributions

Duffy

Huttenlocher

Hedges

et al. 2010

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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“…The authors found anchoring effects in judgments of length, weight, and loudness. Prior studies on the central tendency bias used a constant starting length (Crawford, Huttenlocher, & Engebretson, 2000;Huttenlocher et al, 2000) or a randomized starting length but did not analyze its effects (Duffy & Crawford, 2008). Therefore, we explore anchoring effects in judgments of length, which has not yet been studied in a setting designed to study the central tendency bias.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…In it, categories are summarized as distributions of values along some stimulus dimension, such as size or shape, and a stimulus as a particular value along this dimension. For most categories, the average value of the distribution is the prototypical value (Duffy & Crawford, 2008).…”

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confidence: 99%

Working memory and spatial judgments: Cognitive load increases the central tendency bias

et al. 2016

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Previous work demonstrates that memory for simple stimuli can be biased by information about the distribution of which the stimulus is a member. Specifically, people underestimate values greater than the distribution's average and overestimate values smaller than the average. This is referred to as the central tendency bias. This bias has been explained as an optimal use of both noisy sensory information and category information. In largely separate literature, cognitive load (CL) experiments attempt to manipulate the available working memory of participants in order to observe the effect on choice or judgments. In two experiments, we demonstrate that participants under high cognitive load exhibit a stronger central tendency bias than when under a low cognitive load. Although not anticipated at the outset, we also find that judgments exhibit an anchoring bias not described previously.

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“…Although recency effects are theoretically plausible and have been demonstrated in such domains as memory and persuasion, primacy dominates over recency in the context of categorization (Duffy & Crawford, 2008), the most relevant domain for the present research. tive conditioned, 30 noun conditioned) of conditional frequency on the screen, consisting of noun and adjective conditionality questions about the stimuli they encountered (e.g., "Of all the paintings, how many were costly?…”

Section: Evidence For Primacy Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognition and native-language grammar: The organizational role of adjective-noun word order in information representation

Percy

Sherman

Garcia‐Marques

et al. 2009

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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Decades of inquiry have gone into investigating the notion that language shapes human experience, on the premise that the world is highly complicated and that language assists in making it palatable and understandable. In the present work, we address a related, but more specific, proposition: that the various ways in which languages grammatically organize experience lead to different ways of cognitively organizing experience. Whorf's (1956) linguistic relativity principle is the idea that differences across languages can lead to corresponding differences in cognition. Although early studies (e.g., Heider & Olivier, 1972) were unsupportive of Whorf, more recently linguistic relativity has taken on a new face in a new generation of empirical work that has successfully demonstrated the important role of language in cognitive processes. Characteristic of this recent work is the proposition that, even if language does not determine thought, there still exists much room for the influence of language. These are commonly referred to as the strong and weak forms of the Whorfian hypothesis, respectively (see Boroditsky, 2001). Strong linguistic relativity purports that language severely limits thought, such that subtleties of experience not labeled by one's language are literally imperceptible.Its weak counterpart implies crosslinguistic differences in cognitive tendency, rather than potentiality. It is this weak form that is the focus of much recent work.For example, Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips (2003) investigated the effects of gendered articles (through which certain objects are arbitrarily given either feminine or masculine designations) on object perception. They presented speakers of Spanish and German with objects of opposing genders between the two languages. Participants' descriptions were congruent with each object's grammatical gender in their native language. For example, key was described as stereotypically masculine (e.g., "heavy, jagged, metal") by Germans, but as feminine (e.g., "golden, intricate, little") by Spaniards. Similar crosslinguistic differences have been demonstrated for perceptions of causality as a function of causal language rules (Fausey & Boroditsky, 2008), the ability to remember and match arrays of objects as a function of available counting words (Frank, Everett, Fedorenko, & Gibson, 2008), stereotypic judgments as a function of available stereotype labels (Hoffman, Lau, & Johnson, 1986), and perceptions of colors as a function of available color words (Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000). 1037© In the present research, we investigated the influence of native-language adjective-noun word order on category accessibility for nouns and adjectives by comparing Portuguese speakers (in whose language nouns precede adjectives) with English speakers (in whose language adjectives precede nouns). In two studies, we presented participants with different numbers of verbal or pictorial stimuli, and subsequently they answered questions about noun-and adjective-conditioned frequencies. The resul...

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Primacy or recency effects in forming inductive categories

Cited by 20 publications

References 39 publications

Category effects on stimulus estimation: Shifting and skewed frequency distributions

Category effects on stimulus estimation: Shifting and skewed frequency distributions

Working memory and spatial judgments: Cognitive load increases the central tendency bias

Cognition and native-language grammar: The organizational role of adjective-noun word order in information representation

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