Response scales and sequential effects in judgment

There are persistent sequential effects in judgment tasks. For example, responses tend to be similar to the value of the just-prior stimulus. This is called assimilation. Also, if feedback is or is not provided after each trial, then responses contrast with or assimilate to, respectively, each of several earlier stimuli in the sequence. These context effects have been shown to be independent of stimulus modality and of the range of stimulus values within a modality. By providing different sets of feedback in order to affect the responses used, this article shows that these sequential effects in judgment data are also independent of the form and range of the scale of responses used to label stimuli.