Effects of number of items and visual display variability on same-different discrimination behavior

Leyre Castro; Michael E Young; Edward A Wasserman

doi:10.3758/BF03195931

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Effects of number of items and visual display variability on same-different discrimination behavior

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Effects of number of items and visual display variability on same-different discrimination behavior

Leyre Castro, Michael E Young and Edward A Wasserman

Memory & cognition, Vol.34(8), pp.1689-1703

12/2006

DOI: 10.3758/BF03195931

PMID: 17489295

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Abstract

We explored college students' discrimination of complex visual stimuli that involvedmultiple-item displays. The items in each of the displays could be all the same, all different, or diverse mixtures of some same and some different items. The participants had to learn which of two arbitrary responses was correct for each of the displays without being told about the sameness or differentness of the stimuli. We observed a general improvement in discrimination performance--a rise in choice accuracy and a fall in reaction time-as the number of icons in the display was increased, even when the participants had been trained from the outset with displays containing different numbers of items and when smaller numbers of items were not randomly distributed but grouped in the center of the display. The participants' discrimination behavior also depended on the mixture of same and different items in the displays. Striking individual differences in the participants' discrimination behavior disclosed that people sometimes respond as do pigeons and baboons trained with a similar task. This and previous related research suggest that variability discrimination may lie at the root of same-different categorization behavior.

Visual Perception

Reaction Time

Entropy

Models, Statistical

Discrimination (Psychology)

Humans

Details

Title: Subtitle: Effects of number of items and visual display variability on same-different discrimination behavior
Creators: Leyre Castro - Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA
Michael E Young - Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Edward A Wasserman - University of Iowa
Resource Type: Journal article
Publication Details: Memory & cognition, Vol.34(8), pp.1689-1703
Publisher: United States
DOI: 10.3758/BF03195931
PMID: 17489295
ISSN: 0090-502X
eISSN: 1532-5946
Language: English
Date published: 12/2006
Academic Unit: Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute
Record Identifier: 9984070294002771

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