Judgments of Category Frequency

Abstract

Judgments of category frequency were investigated by presenting instances of natural categories and requesting subjects'' absolute estimates of category size. The variability of individual category occurrences was manipulated to assess whether category size estimates were directly accessed or derived by counting instances. No effect of instance variability on category frequency judgments was found, suggesting that frequency may be encoded directly with the memory representation for the category and simply read off at test. Because alternative explanations could not be ruled out, however, it was concluded that more research into the nature of category frequency judgments is needed.