Abstract
Subjects participating in four experimental groups were asked to give judgments about the sizes of areas of squares according to four different psychophysical procedures: absolute judgment, category judgment, ratio estimation, and magnitude estimation. Results were analyzed by the method of informational analysis. Each stimulus was presented in random order 80 times for each experiment. The informational value of the stimulus sets was 4 bits. The median value of the amounts of transmitted information (in bits) for the second half of each experiment was 2.6 for absolute judgments, 2.9 for category judgments, 2.3 for ratio estimation, and 2.9 for magnitude estimation. Based on the results, we concluded that for this kind of stimuli, (1) there is little difference between absolute judgment on one hand and different kinds of comparative judgment on the other; (2) subjects are similarly limited in making quantitative judgments and nominal (identification) judgments; (3) stimulus x response matrices in psychophysical experiments in which different kinds of comparative judgments are used contain small amounts of information. In such experiments, subjects are able to receive and to handle only a small amount of information contained in stimuli differing in size.
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This article is partly based on the results which were presented at the 22nd International Congress of Psychology in Leipzig, July 6–12, 1980.
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Fulgosi, A., Lugomer, G. & Fulgosi, L. An informational analysis of some comparative psychophysical judgments of apparent sizes. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 24, 379–380 (1986). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330159
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330159