This text explores the phenomenon of "frequency" - one of the major cognitive shortcuts we use to help us make sense of the world. Given the impossibility of knowing about every event that can ever take place, such a tool helps us to predict events and make inferences and judgements.

1. Frequency Processing and Cognition: Introduction and Overview ; THEORETICAL MODELS AND PERSPECTIVES ; 2. Frequency processing: A twenty-five year perspective ; 3. Encoding, representing and estimating event frequencies: A multiple strategy perspective ; 4. In the year 2054: Innumeracy defeated ; 5. Frequency judgements and retrieval structures: Splitting, zooming and merging the units of the empirical world ; 6. Experiential and contextual heuristics in frequency judgement: Ease of recall and response scales ; 7. Tversky and Kahneman's availability approach to frequency judgement: a critical analysis ; 8. A memory models approach to frequency and probability judgement: Applications of Minerva 2 and Minerva-DM ; 9. Associative learning and frequency judgements: The PASS model ; 10. Frequency, contingency and the information processing theory of conditioning ; ESSENTIAL EMPIRICAL RESULTS ; 11. Effects of processing fluency on estimates of probability and frequency ; 12. Frequency judgements of emotions: The cognitive basis of personality assessment ; 13. Online strategies versus memory-based strategies in frequency estimation ; 14. Frequency learning and order effects in belief updating ; 15. The psychophysics metaphor in calibration research ; PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS ; 16. Frequency effects in consumer decision making ; 17. Free word associations and the frequency of co-occurrence in language use ; 18. Technology needs Psychology: How natural frequencies foster insight in medical and legal experts ; 19. Frequency processing and cognition: Stock-taking and outlook

This excellent collection provides the reader with a comprehensive coverage of findings and theories about how people encode and summarize frequency information. While it is a smorgasbord of self-contained chapters with little cross-referencing (or elaboration of disagreements), the high quality of the vast majority of these chapters yields a cognitive feast. They are written by eminent researchers who have opted to present both recent results and summaries of their most important work - certainly not the feared secondary idea or paper submitted because it would be easier to publish in an edited volume than in critically peer reviewed journal.