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E J Shoben

Publications and source records attributed to E J Shoben.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Categorization processes in mental comparisons.

Five experiments explore categorization and category-based congruity effects in mental comparisons. The first 4 experiments concentrate on categorization of infinite-set small items. The experiments vary the additional items presented and whether those items appear once (Experiments 1-2) or repeatedly (Experiments 3-4). Additional items include other small items (Experiment 1), relatively large items (Experiments 2-4), and items involving nonsize dimensions (Experiment 4). The critical small items show a complete congruity effect only in Experiments 1 and 3. Results suggest that categorization of infinite-set items may be based on range information alone (Experiment 1) but that multiple categorizations based on multiple ranges (Experiment 2) may require attentional effort. Results implicate categorization as a central process in mental comparison, despite differences in ease of categorization across paradigm.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The role of part-whole information in reasoning about relative size.

Models of comparative judgment have assumed that relative magnitude is computed from knowledge about absolute magnitude rather than retrieved directly. In Experiment 1, participants verified the relative size of part-whole pairs (e.g., tree-leaf) and unrelated controls (e.g., tree-penny). The symbolic distance effect was much smaller for part-whole pairs than for unrelated controls. In two subsequent experiments, participants determined either which of two objects was closer in size to a third object or which of two pairs had a greater difference in the size of its constituents. In contrast to the paired comparison task in Experiment 1, judgments of part-whole items were more sensitive to the influence of symbolic distance than were unrelated controls. The fact that the part-whole relation attenuates the effects of symbolic distance in a paired comparison task but not in tasks that require an explicit comparison of size differences suggests that the part-whole relation provides a source of information about relative magnitude that does not depend on knowledge about absolute magnitude.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

The effects of prior processing episodes on basic-level superiority.

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of prior processing episodes on people's preference for categorizing objects at the basic level (e.g. dog) relative to their preference for categorizing at the superordinate (e.g. animal) and the subordinate (e.g. Dalmation) levels. The prior processing episode in Experiment 1 was designed to induce subjects to activate representations at the superordinate level, and those in the remaining experiments were designed to induce subjects to differentiate objects at the subordinate level. After the prior processing episodes, subjects performed either a free naming or a picture categorization task that required them to decide whether an illustrated object belonged to a specified category. Results showed that prior processing episodes modestly reduced the superiority of basic level to superordinate level and subordinate level in categorization but not in free naming. The results suggest that the basic-level advantage is subject to the effects of context, but the effects are not as strong as the context effects on other aspects of categorization behaviour (e.g. rating typicality of a category member). Hence, the preference for the basic level is a somewhat more stable, invariant aspect of conceptual representation. Possible determinations of this stability are discussed.

Cognition↗
PubMed1996

The role of categorical information in processing relational attributes.

In two experiments, the effect of knowledge about relevant common taxonomic categories on judgments of relative magnitude was investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the relative size of objects that belonged to the categories building and animal. The symbolic distance effect was smaller for between-category pairs (e.g., horse-cabin) whose members could be classified more quickly into the two categories. This result strongly suggests that subjects used category membership to determine relative size on at least some portion of the trials. In Experiment 2, a similar attenuation of symbolic distance was obtained when subjects judged the relative height of furniture and vehicles. A simple explanation of the reduced symbolic distance effect for between-category pairs is that subjects occasionally fail to categorize the items into different categories and have to compute relative magnitude from the magnitudes of the two items. Fits to the data using the bootstrap technique suggest that more involved assumptions are required.

Concept Formation↗
PubMed1989

The role of expectancy in comparative judgments.

Researchers interested in the processing of relational information have sought a satisfactory explanation for the congruity effect in linear orders. It is relatively easy to select either the greater of two objects that are high on a dimension or the lesser of two objects that are low on a dimension, but it is relatively difficult to determine the greater of two objects that are low in magnitude or the lesser of two objects that are high in magnitude. One explanation of the congruity effect is the expectancy hypothesis that claims that the choice of the comparative primes objects of particular magnitudes. We present two experiments that demonstrate that a congruity effect of equivalent magnitude is obtained when the comparative is presented after the stimulus pair. Moreover, this equivalence cannot be attributed to the salience of the dimensions we employed, because this equivalence held for stimuli that were classified as salient and for those classified as nonsalient. These findings are interpreted in the context of some current explanations of the congruity effect.

Cognition↗
PubMed1985

Event memory: the temporal organization of social action sequences.

We used comparative judgment procedures in two experiments to investigate the cognitive processes that mediate people's reconstruction of the social events they read about. Subjects in Experiment 1 read a passage describing a series of behaviors manifested by a person in three situations. Subsequently, they were given pairs of these actions and were asked to judge either which action occurred sooner or which occurred later. These judgments were (a) faster when the behaviors being compared occurred near the middle of the situation to which they pertained than when they occurred near either the beginning or the end, (b) faster when the three situations were unrelated to one another than when they were thematically related, and (c) faster when the behaviors being compared occurred in different situations than when they occurred in the same situation. Actions were compared more quickly if they were far apart in the overall series presented than if they were close together, replicating the symbolic temporal distance effects obtained when scripted actions are judged on the basis of general knowledge. However, a semantic congruity effect (a tendency for actions near the beginning of the series to be discriminated more quickly when subjects are asked which comes sooner, but for actions near the end to be discriminated more quickly when subjects are asked which comes later) was not evident. In Experiment 2, subjects read a passage about a person's visit to a restaurant in which both generic actions (e.g., ordering the meal) and particularized actions (e.g., salting the fries) were described. Symbolic distance had a greater effect on judgments of particularized actions than on judgments of generic actions. Congruity effects were found only for judgments of generic actions. To account for these effects, a model of temporal order judgments is proposed that considers both the manner in which situation-specific actions are encoded into memory at the time they are learned and the process of comparing the actions at the time they are judged.

Behavior↗
PubMed1985

Context effects in symbolic magnitude comparisons.

Five experiments demonstrate that context has an effect on the ease with which people can determine the relative sizes of pairs of large and small animals. In a standard context, people are faster at choosing the larger of two large animals and the smaller of two small animals. However, when only pairs of small animals are presented (Experiment 1), relatively large pairs (RABBIT-BEAVER) are treated as if they were large animals and are discriminated more rapidly under the choose larger instruction. Similarly, when only large animals are presented (Experiment 2), the smaller of these are now treated as if they were small animals. Several models are presented that account for these effects of context, and these models are examined in subsequent experiments that impose yet other variations in magnitude pairings. The results demonstrate the importance of context in comparative judgement and place important constraints on theories of linear orders.

Female↗
PubMed1983

The role of subtractions and comparisons in comparative judgments involving numerical reference points.

Experiments in which subjects are asked to decide which of two digits is closer in magnitude to a third raise problems for many theories of linear orders. Holyoak (1978), for example, performed a number of these reference point experiments and concluded that they posed serious difficulties for a number of leading models. In their place, he offered the distance ratio model in which the ease of the decision in a reference point task is a function of the ratio of the distances between each stimulus and the reference point. In the present article, three experiments are presented that bear on the adequacy of Holyoak's position. In the first two studies, we present evidence that an important assumption of the distance ratio model is incorrect. In the third experiment, we compare the empirical adequacy of the distance ratio model with our own subtraction model. This model treats the reference point task as a concatenation of two subtractions and a simple digit comparison. This comparison operation is equivalent to the magnitude comparison required in standard linear order experiments. Overall, the subtraction model gives a somewhat better account than the distance ratio.

Adolescent↗