The moderating role of category salience and category focus in judgments of set size and frequency of occurrence

Recent work on frequency estimation has provided evidence that availability , as measured by recall, determines judgments of set size but not of freque ncy of occurrence. The latter in turn rather reflect actual presentation fr equencies. In contrast, the present series of experiments shows that by con trolling category focus during encoding and category salience during recall a dramatically altered pattern of effects is obtained. Adopting the resear ch methodology of Manis, Shedler, Jonides, and Nelson (1993), the authors d emonstrate that recall does influence frequency of occurrence judgments if the superordinate category is brought into focus during encoding. Furthermo re, set size judgments reflect actual presentation frequencies and are almo st uninfluenced by recall if the superordinate category is not salient duri ng recall.