A signal detection analysis of contingency data

There are many psychological tasks that involve the pairing of binary variables. The various tasks used often address different questions and are motivated by different theoretical issues and traditions. Upon closer examination, however, the tasks are remarkably similar in structure. In the present paper, we examine two such tasks, the contingency judgment task and the signal detection task, and we apply a signal detection analysis to contingency judgment data. We suggest that the signal detection analysis provides a novel interpretation of a well-established but poorly understood phenomenon of contingency judgments--the outcome-density effect.