Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 52:2, 72-83 (1998)

Effects of stimulus information and number of stimuli on sequential dependencies in absolute identification

Shuji Mori

Three absolute identification experiments were conducted to examine the effects on sequential dependencies of two factors, namely stimulus information and the number of stimuli used. The data were analysed by multivariate information analysis (Mori, 1991; Mori & Ward, 1995). The results showed that the sequential dependencies became larger as the stimulus information was decreased (Experiments 1 and 3) and as the number of stimuli was increased (Experiments 1 and 2), consistent with previous studies (Garner, 1953; McGill, 1957; Mori & Ward, 1995). These results are discussed in the context of models of sequential dependencies (e.g. Mori, 1989; Ward & Lockhead, 1971). In addition, multiple regression analysis was performed on the present data, and the results were compared with those of the information analysis.