Scharroo J, Leeuwenberg E
The Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information (NICI), Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Cogn Psychol. 2000 Feb;40(1):39-86. doi: 10.1006/cogp.1999.0722.
This study deals with the question whether preferred extrapolations of serial patterns are determined by the extrapolation process or the representation of serial patterns. Three experiments are reported. The first deals with series of letters from the alphabet. Each series gave rise to extrapolations with varying frequencies, and we investigated how well these frequencies are predicted by the information loads, stemming from three models. The model of Klahr and Wallace (1970) is mainly concerned with the process of extrapolation. The model of Simon and Kotovsky (1963) describes both the process and the representation of extrapolated series. A third model is introduced here that exclusively deals with the representation of series. The outcome indirectly indicates that the preferred extrapolation is determined by the simplest representation of a series and not by the simplest process towards this representation. To strengthen the last conclusion two experiments are added dealing with bar graph stimuli. They are designed to experimentally disentangle representation and process complexity. In the second experiment the task was to judge the complexity of each series after having extrapolated the series. In the third experiment, subjects had to judge complexity of extrapolated series without the task to extrapolate the series. The predictions from the three models make plausible that the complexity judgments of second experiment reflect the process of extrapolation and the complexity judgments of the third experiment still reflect the representation of series. The latter results again support the assumption that the preferred extrapolation is determined by the simplest representation of a series.
本研究探讨了连续模式的偏好外推是由外推过程还是连续模式的表征所决定这一问题。报告了三个实验。第一个实验涉及字母表中的字母序列。每个序列都会产生不同频率的外推，我们研究了源自三种模型的信息负荷对这些频率的预测程度。克莱尔和华莱士（1970）的模型主要关注外推过程。西蒙和科托夫斯基（1963）的模型描述了外推序列的过程和表征。这里引入了第三个模型，它专门处理序列的表征。结果间接表明，偏好外推是由序列的最简单表征决定的，而不是由通向该表征的最简单过程决定的。为了强化最后一个结论，增加了两个涉及条形图刺激的实验。它们旨在通过实验区分表征和过程的复杂性。在第二个实验中，任务是在对序列进行外推后判断每个序列的复杂性。在第三个实验中，受试者必须在没有外推序列任务的情况下判断外推序列的复杂性。来自三种模型的预测表明，第二个实验的复杂性判断反映了外推过程，而第三个实验的复杂性判断仍然反映了序列的表征。后一个结果再次支持了偏好外推是由序列的最简单表征决定的这一假设。
