In Exp. I, Si made and rated decisions about two possible outcomes involving tachistoscopically presented materials. The noise (N) condition consisted of a display of random letters; in the signal (S) condition an English word was centered within the random letters. Receiver-operating characteristic curves based upon the data from two durations (.02 and .03 sec.) were close to those predicted by the theory of signal detection (TSD). Exp. II presented a horizontal line of 6 letters at .01-sec. duration. S was to decide whether a particular letter had (S) or had not (N) been part of the display. Again, S rated his confidence in each decision. Although this proved a more difficult task (as indicated by the value of d’), the ROC curves were again as predicted by TSD.
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