Relative judgment and knowledge of the category structure

Stewart, Neil; Matthews, William J.

doi:10.3758/pbr.16.3.594

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…In all cases, the modification includes in the model a very complete representation of the stimulus magnitudes, which runs counter to the basic tenets of relative judgment. The Addendum, below, critiques Stewart and Matthews's (2009) relative account from this perspective.…”

Section: Judgment Relative To the Last Two Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Purely relative models cannot provide a general account of absolute identification

Brown

Marley

Dodds

et al. 2009

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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Unidimensional absolute identification-identifying a presented stimulus from an ordered set-is a common component of everyday tasks. Laboratory investigations have mostly usedAbsolute identification requires participants to identify which stimulus has been presented from a prespecified set. In general, people are unable to accurately identify more than about 8-10 stimuli that vary on a single psychological dimension, which is surprising when comparative judgments with the same stimuli (i.e., judging whether one stimulus is less than, equal to, or greater than another stimulus) are completely accurate. For over 20 years, theories of absolute identification have been divided along a continuum from purely absolute accounts to purely relative accounts (for reviews, see Brown, Marley, Donkin, & Heathcote, 2008;Stewart, Brown, & Chater, 2005). Absolute models assume some form of memory for the magnitude of each stimulus in the set-a set of long-term referents that represent the stimuli. Relative models make a more parsimonious assumption by representing the stimuli with a limited set of partial information. Usually, relative models assume that the only long-term memory is for a single scale factor related to the spacing of the stimuli-that is, to the magnitude differences between adjacent stimuli. The relative approach has proven successful in magnitude estimation tasks (e.g., Luce & Green, 1974;Marley, 1976), and the superficial similarity between the tasks suggests that the same approach may work in absolute identification.The theoretical debate has progressed mainly by pairwise comparison of particular absolute and relative models-for example, Marley and Cook (1984) Here, we present a classwise comparison based on key differences in the way absolute and relative models map from the stimulus to the response space. Rather than relying on small differences in quantitative goodness of fit, we identify a qualitative failure of relative models, caused by their core structure. In particular, we show that relative models make very strong and surprising predictions for experiments in which unequally spaced stimuli are used. We then test these predictions with a new experiment that addresses a potential limitation of past research.We focus on absolute identification experiments with unequally spaced stimuli presented with feedback, which means that participants are informed of the correct response after each trial. Feedback is almost always presented in numeric format (e.g., as a digit on a computer screen), and so researchers have used the term numeric feedback (Holland & Lockhead, 1968, p. 412). The numeric nature of feedback is important in our discussion of relative models, especially of the relative judgment model (RJM;Stewart et al., 2005). In fact, we show that relative models-including the RJM-are unable to account for certain aspects of data from experiments with unequally spaced stimuli. Although it is not the model described by Stewart et al., an extended version of the RJM can account very accurately for unequal...

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Section: Judgment Relative To the Last Two Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We assume that the reader is familiar with the material in the present article (hereafter, BMDH) and in Stewart and Matthews (2009;hereafter, SM). BMDH conclude that a purely relative model cannot account for data from absolute identification experiments with unequally spaced stimuli; SM reach the opposite conclusion.…”

Section: Addendummentioning

confidence: 99%

Purely relative models cannot provide a general account of absolute identification

Brown

Marley

Dodds

et al. 2009

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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“…Brown et al (2009) argued that the RJM needs to contain some absolute knowledge about the spacing between stimuli in the range in order to account for the effects of unequal stimulus spacing. Stewart and Matthews (2009) therefore proposed an augmented RJM to account for unequal spacing effects that contained knowledge of the differences between all stimuli in the stimulus set. As noted by Donkin et al (2015b), relative judgement theorists argue that this is relative knowledge, whereas absolute theorists argue that this represents a long-term memory for the structure of the stimulus set.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative judgement is relatively difficult: Evidence against the role of relative judgement in absolute identification

2015

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A variety of processes have been put forward to explain absolute identification performance. One difference between current models of absolute identification is the extent to which the task involves accessing stored representations in long-term memory (e.g. exemplars in memory, Kent & Lamberts, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 31, 289-305, 2005) or relative judgement (comparison of the current stimulus to the stimulus on the previous trial, Stewart, Brown & Chater, Psychological Review, 112, 881-911, 2005). In two experiments we explored this by tapping into these processes. In Experiment 1 participants completed an absolute identification task using eight line lengths whereby a single stimulus was presented on each trial for identification. They also completed a matching task aimed at mirroring exemplar comparison in which eight line lengths were presented in a circular array and the task was to report which of these matched a target presented centrally. Experiment 2 was a relative judgement task and was similar to Experiment 1 except that the task was to report the difference (jump-size) between the current stimulus and that on the previous trial. The absolute identification and matching data showed clear similarities (faster and more accurate responding for stimuli near the edges of the range and similar stimulus-response confusions). In contrast, relative judgment performance was poor suggesting relative judgement is not straightforward. Moreover, performance as a function of jump-size differed considerably between the relative judgement and absolute identification tasks. Similarly, in the relative judgement task, predicting correct stimulus identification based on successful relative judgement yielded the reverse pattern of performance observed in the absolute identification task. Overall, the data suggest that relative judgement does not underlie absolute identification and that the task is more likely reliant on an exemplar comparison process.

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“…They accept, however, that information from long term memory may also be used (Stewart & Matthews, 2009). There is evidence, for example, that participants rely more upon long term memory when a minority of feedback is unreliable as in probabilistic categorization tasks (Craig, Lewandowsky, & Little, 2011) or when feedback is ceased part way through the categorization task (Nosofsky & Little, 2010).…”

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confidence: 99%

Children with autism do not show sequence effects with auditory stimuli.

Molesworth¹,

Chevallier²,

Happé³

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Connor, 1970;Rimland, 1964;Scheerer, Rothmann, & Goldstein, 1945). Some researchers have suggested that such difficulties may underpin or exacerbate difficulties processing social information (Gastgeb, Strauss, & Minshew, 2006;Klinger & Dawson, 1995). For example, a father struggled to teach his son with autism to stay away from strangers (Klinger & Dawson, 1995). Nosofsky, 1986) reported no differences between an ASD group and control group. Permanent repository linkOnce trained to criterion both participant groups categorized test phase items with similar accuracy and discriminated similarly between memory traces for exemplars (Bott, Brock, Brockdorff, Boucher, & Lamberts, 2006 Evidence that absolute magnitude information is not used comes from estimates of tone loudness, for example. These reflect the perceived magnitude of previous tones (i.e. sequence effects) rather than absolute magnitude information (Baird, Green, & Luce, 1980). To illustrate the influence of sequence effects on categorization, Stewart et al. (2002) designed the category contrast effect task. This paradigm uses stimuli comprising ten auditory tones (Tone 1 to Tone 10) spaced along a unidimensional continuum of pitch. Each tone represents a constant increase in perceived pitch that is associated with an increase in sound frequency by a constant ratio (Krumhansl, 2000;Shepard, 1982). Tones were presented in sequence and with feedback participants learnt to categorize them into two categories; low pitch (the five lowest tones) versus high pitch (the five highest tones).The key variable was response accuracy to the two tones closest to category boundary (Tone 5 and Tone 6). Each boundary tone was preceded by a distant tone (Tone 1 or Tone 10). the participant learns that one tone is "high", and the next tone is even higher, they know that tone will be high too. If the next tone is lower than the high tone, their decision will depend on the magnitude of perceptual difference between the current and preceding tone. For small changes, they are likely to repeat the original response, but larger changes induce a switch in category label. These strategies produce contrast effects in sequential stimuli. Difficulties have also been observed with verbal stimuli and context unfolding over time such as during homograph tasks (Frith & Snowling, 1983;Happé, 1997). These require the participant to read aloud either frequent or infrequent pronunciations of homographs embedded within a sentence that provides context (e.g. "In her eye / dress there was a big tear", Happé, 1997). Participants with autism show a tendency to produce contextually inappropriate frequent pronunciations of homographs. SEQUENCE EFFECTS IN autism SEQUENCE EFFECTS IN autismThese findings are captured by a general explanation of cognitive processing in SEQUENCE EFFECTS IN autism 7 autism, the weak central coherence account (Frith, 1989;Happé, 1994a). Frith (1989) co...

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Relative judgment and knowledge of the category structure

Cited by 8 publications

References 21 publications

Purely relative models cannot provide a general account of absolute identification

Purely relative models cannot provide a general account of absolute identification

Relative judgement is relatively difficult: Evidence against the role of relative judgement in absolute identification

Children with autism do not show sequence effects with auditory stimuli.

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