Psychology

They were seated in front of a window that would display the pictures. They were told to look at the drawings they were going to be presented with in detail and not to memorize the order in which they appeared. The sixteen prototypical drawings were shown to them each exposed for two seconds in random sequences. The group in the first, second, third, and fourth room were shown one, three, nine, and eighteen trials, respectively, with an interval of eight seconds between each trial. Then these groups were divided into groups of ten. They were given the recognition tests immediately after training, after two hours, after two days, and after two weeks. Each subgroup was placed in front of the window and shown each row earlier described. They were told that only one of the pictures in the row had been shown to them before. The participants were told to mark the position of the drawing they had seen before on an answer sheet within eight seconds. If they had not answered after eight seconds they were forced to guess. The results were analyzed using a generalization gradient. That is, the choices had a degree of "wrongness" associated with them based on how similar they were to the prototype. The degrees of error were "correct," "first," "second," "third," "fourth," and "fifth." Basically the results showed that the more exposure trials the group received the fewer they missed, but more importantly the sooner after exposure that the group was tested the fewer they missed. This shows that there is a high correlation between retention interval and the perceived similarity of objects. In the second part of their study they created three new test sheets using the same drawings. This time, however, the rows consisted of only five drawings. One sheet consisted of drawings of first degree similarity and the prototype. The second sheet contained second degree similarity drawings and the prototype, while the third sheet was of similar form only using fifth-degree similarity drawings.