INTEGRATING INFORMATION FROM SEPARABLE PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS

This article examines decision processes in the perception and categorization of stimuli composed of the separable psychological dimensions, orientation and size. The randomization technique (Ashby & Gott, 1988) of general recognition theory, which allows accurate estimation of a subject's decision boundary in a categorization task, is used in 4 experiments. Even though the stimulus components are clearly separable, it was found that Ss were not constrained to use separable response strategies, nor were they constrained to attend to distance to the prototypes. Instead, they used decision rules that were nearly optimal, even if this required information integration or for the Ss to attend to higher level category properties such as component correlation.