The salience of part-whole relatedness on reasoning about relative magnitude
Sailor, Kevin Matthew
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/23535
Description
Title
The salience of part-whole relatedness on reasoning about relative magnitude
Author(s)
Sailor, Kevin Matthew
Issue Date
1991
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Shoben, Edward J.
Department of Study
Psychology, Experimental
Discipline
Psychology, Experimental
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Psychology, Experimental
Language
eng
Abstract
Three experiments demonstrate that part-whole pairs (e.g., tree-leaf) are processed much differently than pairs of unrelated objects in comparative judgment tasks. In Experiment 1 subjects verified the relative size of part-whole pairs and unrelated controls. The effect of symbolic distance was much smaller for part-whole pairs than for unrelated controls. This attenuation of the symbolic distance effect is inconsistent with most models of comparative judgment because they propose that relative magnitude is computed from a comparison of absolute magnitude. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that the relative magnitude of part-whole pairs is determined by directly retrieving relational information. Subjects judged which of two objects was closer to a third reference object. Subjects were reliably faster for triples with part-whole pairs only when the part-whole relation could be used to infer which of the two objects was closer to the reference object. This result indicates that the attenuation of symbolic distance in Experiment 1 is attributable to the use of relational information. Finally, an introduction of a SOA between stimulus pair and question in Experiment 3 provided evidence that some of the advantage of part-whole pairs is attributable to an early encoding advantage.
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