Attention - Control in the Frequentistic Processing of Multidimensional Event Streams

摘要

Cognitive researchers have suggested that people encode the frequency attribute of items repeated in memory lists as in 'automatic' by-product of their primary task (e.g., recall, recognition). Previous studies of our own, however, have questioned this automatically for tasks of more realistic complexity. Therefore, the present series was carried out to clarify the role of active processing in frequency estimation (FE). Experiment 1 was simply a preliminary exercise designed to identify individuals with good time-sharing skills for use in subsequent studies. Experiment 2 used a 'policy-capturing' approach to estimate the amount of importance attached by each subject to each dimension in an applicant-rating task. Experiment 3 sought to determine whether the attentive effort must be invested in specific kinds of processing in order to produce better FE's.