Exploring and reexploring issues of integrality, perceptual sensitivity, and dimensional salience

doi:10.1016/0022-0965(83)90040-1

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Volume 36, Issue 3, December 1983, Pages 365-379

https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-0965(83)90040-1 Get rights and content

Abstract

Some observations that can be described conveniently by investigators in terms of dimensional sensitivity and dimensional salience actually need not implicate the psychological reality of the dimensions for the subjects. The developmental hypothesis that stimuli are perceived often as integral in early childhood can account for such phenomena only with the assumption that young children often apprehend objects as global wholes, related to one another by overall similarity. Classification data, recently presented by J. R. Aschkenasy and R. D. Odom (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1982, 34, 435–448) can be reinterpreted in this way. On this reinterpretation, Aschkenasy and Odom's findings are exactly what the developmental form of the integrality-separability hypothesis predicts. Moreover, a variety of other findings and lines of inference converge on the conclusion that, in young children, the use of overall similarity relations to organize perception and cognition predominates over the use of dimensional relations (and that the relative balance between these stimulus relations changes in development). Examples are selected from the literature on the natural development of word meanings, as well as from the literatures on children's and adults' classification.

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Two experiments examined college students’ discrimination of complex visual displays that involved different degrees of variability or “entropy.” Displays depicted 16 line drawings of various shapes and colors; the participants needed to learn to classify a display in terms of its variability in shape or color while discounting variability in the other dimension (Experiment 1), or to classify based on both shape and color variability (Experiment 2). The participants’ accuracy and reaction time scores on a two-alternative forced-choice discrimination disclosed that people can learn to discount variability in an irrelevant dimension when necessary, but this variability does affect performance. Our data further suggest that variability discrimination depends on degrees of similarity across multiple dimensions thus underscoring the shortcomings of a measure of categorical variability (e.g., entropy) that only considers whether items are identical or different.
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^☆: Preparation of this paper was supported by NSF Grant BNS 79-24035, and by a Lang Faculty Fellowship from Swarthmore College. It also was aided by Larry A. Nelson.

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Exploring and reexploring issues of integrality, perceptual sensitivity, and dimensional salience☆

Abstract

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Word, object, and conceptual development

The acquisition of word meaning: An investigation into some current conflicts

Nonanalytic concept formation and memory for instances

The relation between stimulus analyzability and perceived dimensional structure

What's in a word? On the child's acquisition of semantics in his first language

Holistic and analytic modes of processing: The multiple determinants of perceptual analysis

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

The processing of information and structure

Principles of perceptual learning and development