Multiple Congruity Effects in Judgments of Magnitude
Cech, C.G., Shoben, E.J., & Love, M. (1990).
Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16,
1142-1152.
Abstract
Four experiments investigate a novel finding in the area of
symbolic magnitude comparisons: Congruity effects may occur with subsets
of objects. Such multiple congruity effects appear to signal the
creation of size-ordered categories. Experiment 1 observed separate
congruity effects for large and small pairs despite the intermingling of
pairs within a session. Experiment 2 determined whether this result
was an artifact of the items used. Experiments 3 and 4 examined whether
linear separability on a dimension of size or some other correlated dimension
was a prerequisite for multiple size-ordered categorization. The
results of these experiments suggest that congruity effects are properly
regarded as indicating the presence of an organized structure or category.
Thus, to the extent that congruity effects typify magnitude comparisons,
the processing of relational information appears to implicate categorization.