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Application of a Trace Model to the Retention of Information in a Recognition Task

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Roger N. Shepard
Roger N. Shepard*
Affiliation:
Bell Telephone Laboratories
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Abstract

A stochastic model is proposed to account for the behavior of subjects in recognition tasks in which stimuli are presented, one at a time, in a protracted sequence. The basic assumption is that the memory trace resulting from the presentation of a particular stimulus not only fades away during the presentation of subsequent stimuli but also “diffuses” in such a way as to become decreasingly stimulus specific. An account is thereby provided for both (a) the increase in the probability of false recognition with the total number of stimulus presentations and (b) the departure of curves of forgetting from the previously proposed simple exponential decay functions. An expression for the amount of information carried along when the number of stimulus presentations becomes large is then derived for subjects who conform with the model.

Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1961 , pp. 185 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © 1961 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

*

The author has benefited from discussions of this work with J. W. Tukey, J. R. Pierce, E. N. Gilbert, and D. Slepian of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and with G. A. Miller of Harvard University.

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