Judgment of recency under steady-state conditions

Assessed judgment of recency (JOR) of sequentially presented items in 8 undergraduate Ss. Each S received 8 different sequences of 250 items, each item being 1 of 8 letters of the alphabet. The items were distributed within the sequences so that each of the possible intervals, 1-15, between successive presentations of the same item occurred approximately equally often. Mean JOR was a negatively accelerated increasing function of the actual recency, with the proportion of perfect judgments declining from 100% to chance performance after about 9 intervening presentations. The Weber-Fechner psychophysical function accurately described the mean, median, and variance of recency judgments and of the proportional constant error function. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).