Abstract
In each of two experiments the direction of a binary comparison was contingent on the category of the stimulus pair. In one experiment, participants had to compare the size of animals from memory. On congruent trials, they had to select the smaller animal if both were small and the larger if both were large and on incongruent trials they selected the larger if both were small and the smaller if both were large. In a second experiment, participants had to compare visual extents and the direction of the comparison was contingent on whether the lines were short or long. Response times were increased and semantic congruity effects (SCEs) were greatly amplified with the category-contingent instructions relative to the conventional non-contingent instructions, precisely as predicted by the class of evidence accrual models of decisional processing and contrary to the single-sample stage models of the SCE.
Highlights
Semantic congruity effects (SCEs) reflect a robust and enduring property of comparative judgments involving both perceptual and symbolic stimuli
With respect to the former view, some evidence is available in these results to indicate that decisional processing itself is slowed by the requirement to perform category-contingent comparisons
Such findings clearly indicate that something more is happening to the processing that is occurring in the category-contingent instruction condition than the simple insertion of an initial stimulus categorization process
Summary
Semantic congruity effects (SCEs) reflect a robust and enduring property of comparative judgments involving both perceptual and symbolic stimuli. The SCE poses an ongoing challenge to all currently available theories of the comparison process. Regarding something as being the smaller of two things is logically equivalent to regarding the other as being the larger, no information processing differences between these two types of comparison conditions would be expected (i.e., they should be interchangeable but are not). A number of theories have been proposed as accounts for this effect in the past, incorporating them into the currently available, more formal, comparison models (e.g., Usher and McClelland, 2001; Ratcliff and Smith, 2004: Verguts et al, 2005; Brown and Heathcote, 2008) is not trivial and, for the most part, has not been attempted (except by the current authors)
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