An application of a dynamic model of judgment to magnitude production

A dynamic model of judgment, together with a model of stimulus context effects, is applied to magnitude production (MP) and magnitude estimation (ME) experiments. Participants' responses in MP were correlated across trials, as is typically found for ME. The magnitudeof the autocorrelation, however, was small, which suggests that participants in MP tend to rely more heavily on a long-term frame of reference. Second, a stimulus context effect found for ME did not appear for MP, most likely because of the different nature of the task (i.e., intermediate values of the stimulus were heard while the participant produced a response). A fit of an earlier regression model, on the other hand, suggests that the number presented on the previous trial in MP has a large contrastive effect on the current response. The present model offers a different view of this result, in that it shows that a negative coefficient for the earlier model is consistent with a positive judgmental effect. The regression effect noted by Stevens and Greenbaum (1966), which is a value of the estimated ME exponent that is smaller than the inverse of the estimated MP exponent, was also found; it i s shown that the effect did not arise from bias in estimation.