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Abstract

Aspects of stimulus encoding were assessed in two experiments by comparing confidence ratings given to actual stimuli with ratings given to variants of the stimuli that systematically distorted identity and position information about individual components. The results indicated that even after a single trial the encoded representation of the stimulus contained information about the identity and position of all individual components and the relationships among components. While neither higher degrees of associative learning nor additional learning trials altered the relative importance of various types of information contained in the encoding, signal detection analyses indicated that both factors increased the subject's over-all sensitivity to the stimulus. Response-similarity had no effect on stimulus learning when trials were controlled. The results are discussed with respect to previous studies on selection of stimuli and independence of components.

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Information Contained in the Encoded Representation of the Stimulus

Abstract

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References