Biomedical subjects

K M Sailor

Publications and source records attributed to K M Sailor.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

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↗

PubMed1998

Evidence for an impaired ability to determine semantic relations in Alzheimer's disease patients.

An important feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD) that differentiates it from normal aging is the deterioration of semantic memory. The purpose of this study was to determine if the poor performance of AD patients on tasks that require them to use semantic memory is related to their inability to identify specific semantic relations. This hypothesis was tested by comparing the reaction times and error rates of AD patients to those of the normal elderly and normal young in a sentence verification task. We found that AD patients were significantly slower and less accurate than the normal elderly and the young on aspects of the task that required the knowledge of specific semantic relationships. In a 2nd experiment, young normal participants performed the same task with a concurrent memory load. The results from Experiment 2 indicate that the performance of AD patients in this task cannot be attributed to a diminished working memory capacity.

Adult↗

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↗

PubMed1993

Evidence for implicit scaling in comparative judgment.

In two experiments, we examined the effects of manipulating the density of stimuli on comparison difficulty in a comparative judgment task. In Experiment 1, subjects was slower at judging the relative size of a pair when the members were adjacent items in the linear order than when the members were separated by items of intervening magnitudes. In Experiment 2, the advantage of choosing the larger rather than the smaller of two large stimuli (e.g., the congruity effect) increased when the linear order included many small items. In contrast, the advantage of choosing the smaller of two small items increased when the linear order included many large items. The applicability of the range-frequency theory (Parducci, 1965) to these results is discussed.

Attention↗

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↗