Rule structure in the psychological representation of physical settings

Abstract

Three experiments were performed to demonstrate how physical settings may be conceptualized in terms of the behavioral rules associated with them. Subjects participated in similarity rating, recognition memory, and likelihood estimation tasks. In the similarity rating task, overlap in the rules listed in free response protocols for 10 different settings predicted global similarity ratings between pairs of settings. In the recognition memory task, after subjects read a description of a stimulus person behaving in ways prescribed by a setting, distractor behaviors highly typical of a given setting were more effective in eliciting false positive recognitions than were distractors less typical of the setting in question. Finally, subjects were asked to predict the future behavior of a stimulus person on the basis of a behavioral description of past behavior characteristic of a particular setting. Subsequently, these subjects rated future behaviors highly typical of that setting as more probable than behaviors less typical of that setting. Taken together, these data argue that behavioral rules should be viewed as a part of the cognitive representation of physical settings.