To ‘distribute’ something is to share it out or spread it out. In mathematics a ‘distribution’ is about the spread of a data set, showing all the possible values in the data set and how frequently each occurs. You can’t express a distribution as a single number like you can central tendency, dispersion and correlation. Distributions can be shown as a table but are most commonly seen in the form of a frequency graph (with frequency on the y-axis).
Figure 1 shows a typical distribution which you might obtain in a digit-span task, a measure of how many items can be kept in shortterm memory.
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