Further analysis of the Crist data on matching performance and the similarity structure of the stimulus set.

Abstract

We argue that Crist's (1981) analysis of his data on letter matching is incomplete because he did not sufficiently distinguish overall context similarity from the similarity of the other letter present on a trial. That is, the separation of the effects of context similarity and visual similarity is required for a complete analysis. Accordingly, for different trials, modified indices of context similarity are derived and linear regression analyses made to determine the separate effects of context and visual similarity. The results of these analyses show that on different trials, visual similarity is much more predictive of latency than context similarity and that subjects must therefore be making visual similarity judgments, that considerably affect latency variation on these trials. Consequently, we argue that visual similarity judgment may be likewise affecting latency on same trials. However, some simple correlations indicate that context may be more predictive of latency on physically different same trials. We concluded that what can be said about context depends on the type of trial and that the comparative strength of name processing should also be assessed by the method described here.