The effects of rehearsal on frequency coding

Abstract

It has been claimed (e.g., Hasher & Zacks, 1979,1984) that encoding of frequency information is a result of an automatic process. This claim has been supported by experimentation that has included tests of several criteria suggested for the identification of automatic processes. The present experiment extends these tests to a case in which frequency judgments were obtained in a rehearsal task with massed presentation. In this task, frequency coding was very sensitive to strategy manipulation. In fact, in one condition there was no reliable evidence of any frequency coding. These results are at odds with the claim that frequency coding is automatic. © 1985, The psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.