Stimulus vs Response Uncertainty in Recognition
John A. Swets, Susan T. Sewall · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1961
We raise again, in the framework of a very simple recognition task, the question of the relative efficacy of specifying the stimulus alternatives before and after the stimulus is presented. Our experiments show information given before the observation to facilitate recognition and information given after the observation to have little, if any, effect. We conclude that the facilitative effect of restricting alternatives, in the task studied, depends on a perceptual mechanism rather than on a response mechanism. These experiments are discussed in connection with two current psychological theories: the theory of signal detectability, which is essentially a perceptual theory, and the theory of individual choice behavior, which is essentially a response theory. The results of another experiment, the only other experiment discovered to date for which these two theories make different predictions, are also reported. In this experiment, too, the results are in agreement with the detection theory.