Visual form perception: Congruence among spatial configurations

Abstract

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques were used to obtain spatial solutions for judgments of similarity and discrimination difficulty between pairs of random polygons. For both tasks, it was possible to psychophysically predict the three dimensions of the final solutions using physical measures of the forms. These solutions were compared to each other and to a spatial analysis of discrimination difficulty measured in visual noise (Aiken & Brown, 1968) using canonical correlation techniques. Although the two judgment tasks were highly similor, it was concluded that neither was similar to the discrimination-in-noise solution.