Absolute Judgments Research Articles

Impacts of brightness contrast, road environment complexity, travel direction and judgement type on speed perception errors among older adult pedestrians' road-crossing decision-making.

This study aimed to explore how various factors affect older people's vehicle speed perception to enhance their road safety as pedestrians, focusing on the impact of their cognitive and perceptual abilities on road-crossing decisions. The study evaluated the effects of brightness contrast (high, medium and low), road complexity (high and low) and vehicle travel direction (same and opposite) on speed perception errors in simulated traffic settings. It involved 38 older participants who estimated the speed of a comparison vehicle under two judgement conditions. Findings showed a consistent underestimation of speed in all conditions. A repeated-measure ANOVA revealed that speed perception errors were significantly higher with low brightness contrast, in simpler road environments, with vehicles travelling in the same direction, and when using absolute judgements. These results have practical importance for public safety initiatives, traffic regulation and road design catering to older adults' perceptual needs. They also provide valuable insights for driver training programs for older adults, aimed at enhancing their understanding and management of perceptual biases.

Can an isolated middle-series item make a "Dent" in the bow-shaped serial-position curve of comparative judgments?

Studies have shown that local (e.g., midseries) items' specific properties, including being isolated from rest of the items, can generate a local distinctiveness effect, enhancing the memory performance for the local items in serial recall or absolute judgments. However, this has not been the case in relative (comparative) judgments. For the first time, the present study found a local distinctiveness effect in comparative judgments by using an opposite-gender name for the midseries item in an otherwise uniformly one-gender name serial list. The reasons for the previous studies' failure to produce this effect in comparative judgments and the present study's success in obtaining it were discussed. The implication of the finding for the item/order information opponent-process theories was also suggested.

The effects of vehicle color and travel direction on perceived speed error varies by judgment type among older pedestrians

Objective Misjudgments of vehicle speed or distance frequently lead to collisions, particularly among older pedestrians who are less accurate in estimating vehicle speeds than younger individuals. However, comprehensive studies that assess multiple factors influencing speed perception in older pedestrians are lacking. Methods This research utilized computer simulations to explore how vehicle color (red, green, blue) and direction of travel (approaching or receding) affect perceived speed errors in both relative and absolute judgment scenarios among older pedestrians. Results Data from 38 older adults and 40 college students indicated that red vehicles were associated with fewer perceived speed errors than either green or blue vehicles. Errors increased for vehicles moving away, with absolute judgments showing greater discrepancies than relative ones. Analysis revealed that, across various combinations of the three independent variables—vehicle color, vehicle direction, and judgment type—the older participants exhibited significantly larger perceived speed errors compared to college students. Furthermore, the study identified significant interactions between vehicle color and direction, and between judgment type and vehicle direction. Conclusion Our findings are beneficial in understanding the factors influencing older pedestrians’ speed perceptions, aiding public safety and informing car design to ensure safer roads for older pedestrians.

The effects of vowel, pitch, and dynamics on the emotional characteristics of the Mezzo-Soprano, Countertenor, and Baritone Voices

Previous research on the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices have shown that their emotional characteristics change with different vowel, pitch, and dynamics. This work continues the investigation with the mezzo-soprano, countertenor, and baritone voices. Listening tests were conducted whereby listeners gave absolute judgements on the voice tones over ten emotional categories, with the data analyzed using logistic regression. High-arousal categories were stronger for loud tones, whereas low-arousal categories were stronger for soft tones. The categories Happy, Heroic, Romantic, and Comic had an upward trend across the pitch range, whereas Calm, Mysterious, Shy, and Sad had a downward trend. Angry and Scary had different trends among the voices. For most categories, all five vowels were mostly similar in terms of emotional expressiveness, with exceptional cases for the baritone voice. Overall, pitch had the strongest effect and was almost twice as strong as dynamics and vowel, with dynamics slightly stronger than vowel. Vowel O had the largest strength-of-expressiveness overall, closely followed by vowels U and A, and finally vowels I and E last. These results give a quantified preliminary perspective on how vowel, pitch, and dynamics shape emotional expression in the voices across a wide range of voice types.

Perceptual anchoring effects: Evidence of response bias and a change in estimates sensitivity.

People's estimates of perceptual quantities are commonly biased by the contextual presence of other quantities (like numbers). In this study, we address assimilation anchoring effects (approximation of real quantities to contextual quantities) that occur for visually displayed proportions, defining a new methodological setting for the effect. Similar to classic approaches, we asked participants across several trials whether the display contained a feature in a proportion higher or lower than "a randomly selected value" (relative judgments), and then estimated the feature proportions (absolute judgments). Across all trials, we presented seven anchors ranging from .20 to .80, each with a visually displayed representation of the same seven proportions (49 judgments in total). This allowed for a psychophysical approach to individual estimates and signal detection indexes, providing new insights into how the anchoring effect is generated in this setting. Our findings suggest that anchoring effects occur both as a bias (changes in response criteria) and as a change in the ability to discriminate stimuli (affecting sensitivity indexes). Moreover, anchors modulate the level of stimuli features for which estimates were more uncertain. Finally, our results indicate that anchor effects occur immediately in the first phase of the two-phase paradigm, leading to the availability of values for supporting absolute estimates. By using a psychophysical approach to the anchoring effects, for the first time, we could clarify that this effect is the result of both bias and changes in the ability to discriminate quantity.

The emotional characteristics of bass drums, snares, and disengaged snares with different strokes and dynamics

Recent research has explored the emotional characteristics of pitched instruments and the voice. This study investigates the emotional characteristics of the unpitched bass drum, snare drum, and disengaged snare drum. The objective is to explore how the choice of instrument, drum strokes (e.g., single stroke and roll), and dynamics influence the perceived emotional characteristics. Listening tests were carried out with 46 participants, who provided absolute judgments on the sounds in terms of Valence and Arousal on a 5-point Likert scale, alongside the presence of 16 emotional categories: Agitated, Angry, Scary, Terrifying, Joyful, Playful, Slapstick, Exciting, Depressing, Spooky, Mysterious, Nervous, Calm, Gentle, Relaxed, and Peaceful. Data from the listening tests were analyzed using linear regression. Overall, the choice of instrument, drum strokes, and dynamics significantly and similarly influenced Arousal, whereas the choice of instrument had a much stronger effect on Valence than the other two. Specifically, the bass drum was strongly correlated with almost all negative emotions and inversely correlated with high-energy positive emotions. The type of drum strokes was relatively strongly correlated with low-energy positive categories and Agitated. Dynamics had a more secondary effect. These findings offer some detailed insights into how specific emotional characteristics are perceived for drums.

The emotional characteristics of the piano, celeste, and harp with different pitch and dynamics

This work investigates how pitch and dynamics influence the characters of the piano, celeste, and harp. We conducted listening tests where listeners gave absolute judgements on these sounds over ten emotional categories, and analyzed the data with logistic regression. With respect to pitch, the categories Happy, Romantic, Comic, Calm, and Shy had an arched shape that peaked around C6. Heroic, angry, and sad decreased with pitch. Mysterious did not show a clear trend with pitch. Scary had an asymmetric U-shape that was especially strong at the lowest pitch. With respect to dynamics, happy, heroic, comic, and angry were stronger for loud notes, whereas Romantic, Calm, Mysterious, Shy, and Sad were stronger for soft notes. For scary, loud and soft notes were about the same. Overall, pitch and dynamics had about an equally important effect on the piano, celeste, and harp emotional characteristics. Some characteristics such as Happy were affected more by pitch, while others such as Shy were affected more by dynamics. The emotional characteristics of the piano, celeste, and harp were largely similar for most categories, though there were some differences for categories such as Mysterious.

Performance variability and affordance perception: practice effects on perceptual judgments for walking versus throwing.

To judge whether an action is possible, people must perceive "affordances"-the fit between features of the environment and aspects of their own bodies and motor skills that make the action possible or not. But for some actions, performance is inherently variable. That is, people cannot consistently perform the same action under the same environmental conditions with the same level of success. Decades of research show that practice performing an action improves perception of affordances. However, prior work did not address whether practice with more versus less variable actions is equally effective at improving perceptual judgments. Thirty adults judged affordances for walking versus throwing a beanbag through narrow doorways before and after 75 practice trials walking and throwing beanbags through doorways of different widths. We fit a "success" function through each participant's practice data in each task and calculated performance variability as the slope of the function. Performance for throwing was uniformly more variable than for walking. Accordingly, absolute judgment error was larger for throwing than walking at both pretest and posttest. However, absolute error reduced proportionally in both tasks with practice, suggesting that practice improves perceptual judgments equally well for more and less variable actions. Moreover, individual differences in variability in performance were unrelated to absolute, constant, and variable error in perceptual judgments. Overall, results indicate that practice is beneficial for calibrating perceptual judgments, even when practice provides mixed feedback about success under the same environmental conditions.

Numerosity depends on normalized contrast energy: Review and square-root law model

The perceived numerosity of many randomly-located items of fixed contrast depends on the integrated contrast energy (CE) of the display. We show here that a model based on √(CE), normalized by contrast amplitude, can fit numerosity judgment data in various tasks and over a wide range of numerosities. The model shows that judged numerosity increases linearly with √(N), where N is the number of displayed items above the subitization range, and can explain: 1) the general underestimation in absolute judgement of numerosity; 2) the contrast independence (constancy) of numerosity judgment in segregated displays, i.e., judged numerosities are not affected by item contrast; 2) a contrast-dependent illusion where the numerosity of higher-contrast items is further underestimated when intermingled with lower-contrast items; and 3) both the threshold and sensitivity of numerosity discrimination between displays of N and M items. The nearly perfect fit of numerosity judgment data by a square-root law over a wide range of numerosities, including the range typically described by Weber’s law, but excluding subitization, suggests that normalized contrast energy might be the prevailing sensory code underlying numerosity perception.

Is terrorism necessarily violent? Public perceptions of nonviolence and terrorism in conflict settings

AbstractDiscussions of terrorism assume actual or threatened violence, but the term is regularly used to delegitimize rivals' nonviolent actions. Yet do ordinary citizens accept descriptions of nonviolence as terrorism? Using a preregistered survey-experiment in Israel, a salient conflictual context with diverse repertoires of contention, we find that audiences rate adversary nonviolence close to terrorism, consider it illegitimate, and justify its forceful repression. These perceptions vary by the action's threatened harm, its salience, and respondents' ideology. Explicitly labeling nonviolence as terrorism, moreover, particularly sways middle-of-the-road centrists. These relationships replicate in a lower-salience conflict, albeit with milder absolute judgments, indicating generalizability. Hence, popular perceptions of terrorism are more fluid and manipulable than assumed, potentially undermining the positive effects associated with nonviolent campaigns.

An Item Response Theory Model for Incorporating Response Times in Forced-Choice Measures

Forced-choice (FC) measures have been widely used in many personality or attitude tests as an alternative to rating scales, which employ comparative rather than absolute judgments. Several response biases, such as social desirability, response styles, and acquiescence bias, can be reduced effectively. Another type of data linked with comparative judgments is response time (RT), which contains potential information concerning respondents’ decision-making process. It would be challenging but exciting to combine RT into FC measures better to reveal respondents’ behaviors or preferences in personality measurement. Given this situation, this study aims to propose a new item response theory (IRT) model that incorporates RT into FC measures to improve personality assessment. Simulation studies show that the proposed model can effectively improve the estimation accuracy of personality traits with the ancillary information contained in RT. Also, an application on a real data set reveals that the proposed model estimates similar but different parameter values compared with the conventional Thurstonian IRT model. The RT information can explain these differences.

Autocorrelation in category judgement.

Jesteadt et al. discovered a remarkable pattern of autocorrelation in log estimates of loudness. Responses to repeated stimuli correlated to about +0.7, but that correlation was much reduced (0.1) following large differences between successive stimuli. The experiment reported here demonstrates the same pattern in absolute identification without feedback; if feedback is supplied, the pattern is much muted. A model is proposed for this pattern of autocorrelation, based on the premise: "There is no absolute judgment of sensory magnitudes; nor is there any absolute judgment of differences/ratios between sensory magnitudes." Each stimulus in an experiment is compared with its predecessor, greater, less than, or about the same. The variability of that comparison increases with the difference in magnitude between the stimuli, so the assessment of a stimulus far removed from its predecessor is very uncertain. The model provides explanations for the apparent normal variability of sensory stimuli, for the "bow" effect and for the widely reported pattern of sequential effects. It has applications to the effects of stimulus range, to the difficulty of identifying more than five stimuli on a single continuum without error, and to inspection tasks in general, notably medical screening and the marking of examination scripts.

The Ancestors Call from the Future: Genealogy, Ancestrality, Judgment

ABSTRACT This article explores the recent and growing invocation of the concept of ancestrality in a self-consciously ethicized critical practice. It commences by undertaking a genealogy of ancestrality and reflecting on the convergences and divergences between these two terms—genealogy and ancestrality. The article then draws upon both the canonical anthropological archive wherein relations to ancestors were discussed and the author’s own extended research among people in southern Africa for whom ancestors are part of the cultural commonsense. On this basis, the author argues that, at least among those people with whom she is familiar, the ancestors are not figures of a past nor figures of moral virtue. Rather, they call from the future and orient action toward a community of recognition to which the living aspire. This community does not have a final judgment as the precondition of admission, and indeed, the article calls into question the deployment of the ancestral as the figure of an absolute judgment, while pointing to the risks of a primitivist nostalgia in the effort to make Africa not only of the site of irreparable loss but the name and locus of a lost wisdom that could ameliorate the social crises of our contemporaneity.

Temporal encoding: Relative and absolute representations of time guide behavior.

Temporal information-processing is critical for adaptive behavior and goal-directed action. It is thus crucial to understand how the temporal distance between behaviorally relevant events is encoded to guide behavior. However, research on temporal representations has yielded mixed findings as to whether organisms utilize relative versus absolute judgments of time intervals. To address this fundamental question about the timing mechanism, we tested mice in a duration discrimination procedure in which they learned to correctly categorize tones of different durations as short or long. After being trained on a pair of target intervals, the mice were transferred to conditions in which cue durations and corresponding response locations were systematically manipulated so that either the relative or absolute mapping remained constant. The findings indicate that transfer occurred most readily when relative relationships of durations and response locations were preserved. In contrast, when subjects had to re-map these relative relations, even when positive transfer initially occurred based on absolute mappings, their temporal discrimination performance was impaired, and they required extensive training to re-establish temporal control. These results demonstrate that mice can represent experienced durations both as having a certain magnitude (absolute representation) and as being shorter or longer of the two durations (an ordinal relation to other cue durations), with relational control having a more enduring influence in temporal discriminations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Critiquing the rationales for using comparative judgement: a call for clarity

ABSTRACT Comparative judgment is gaining popularity as an assessment tool, including for high-stakes testing purposes, despite relatively little research on the use of the technique. Advocates claim two main rationales for its use: that comparative judgment is valid because humans are better at comparative than absolute judgment, and because it distils the aggregate view of expert judges. We explore these contentions. We argue that the psychological underpinnings used to justify the method are superficially treated in the literature. We conceptualise and critique the notion that comparative judgment is ‘intrinsically valid’ due to its use of expert judges. We conclude that the rationales as presented by the comparative judgment literature are incomplete and inconsistent. We recommend that future work should clarify its position regarding the psychological underpinnings of comparative judgment, and if necessary present a more compelling case; for example, by integrating the comparative judgment literature with evidence from other fields.

The effects of vowel, pitch, and dynamics on the emotional characteristics of the Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass Voices

Previous research on the soprano and tenor voices have shown that their emotional characteristics change with different vowel, pitch, and dynamics. This work continues the investigation with the alto and bass voices. Listening tests were conducted whereby listeners gave absolute judgements on the SATB voice tones over ten emotional categories with the data analyzed using logistic regression. High-arousal categories were stronger for loud tones, whereas low-arousal categories were stronger for soft tones. The categories Happy, Heroic, Romantic, and Shy had mostly upward trends across the pitch range, whereas Angry had an overall downward trend. Calm and Sad had an arch-shaped trend, while Scary had a U-shaped trend. Comic and Mysterious had different trends among the voices. The voices each exhibited different vowel trends, though vowel A was dominant for all the voice types in the categories Happy and Romantic. Dynamics had the strongest effect overall, followed closely by pitch, with both effects approximately twice as strong as the effect of vowel. Vowel U had the largest strength-of-expressiveness overall, with A second, O third, I fourth, and finally E last. These results give a quantified preliminary perspective on how vowel, pitch, and dynamics shape emotional expression in the SATB voices.

A comparison of the emotional characteristics of western orchestral sustaining musical instrument families with different pitch and dynamics

Recent research has shown that the emotional characteristics of the bowed strings and brass change with different pitch and dynamics. This work compares how pitch and dynamics influence their characters in the western orchestral sustaining musical instruments. We conducted listening tests where listeners gave absolute judgements on the sounds over ten emotional categories and analyzed the data with logistic regression. For pitch, the categories Happy and Heroic had an arched shape that peaked at C6. Romantic, Calm, and Shy increased until C4 and decreased afterwards. Comic and Mysterious did not shown a clear common trend with pitch. Angry and Scary had a U-shape that was slightly stronger at the highest pitch, while Sad decreased with pitch. For dynamics, Happy, Heroic, Comic, and Angry were stronger for loud notes, while Romantic, Calm, Mysterious, Shy, and Sad were stronger for soft notes. For Scary, loud and soft notes were about the same. In the bowed strings and woodwinds, pitch and dynamics had about an equally important effect on the emotional characteristics, while pitch had a more important effect than dynamics in the brass. For the bowed strings, brass, and woodwinds, the particular instrument was more of a secondary factor though still important.

Judgment accuracy of German student texts: Do teacher experience and content knowledge matter?

The central purpose of our study is to analyze whether teacher experience and content knowledge relate to teacher judgments on student report texts. Ninety-one experienced teachers, including 27 specializing in the subject of the German language, and 136 teacher students, including 37 majoring in German Studies, participated in this study. Participants assessed ten randomly selected authentic student reports from ninth graders. Experienced teachers revealed a lower absolute judgment accuracy revealing stricter and more heterogeneous judgments than teacher students and specially trained experts. However, relative judgment accuracy (correlation between teachers' and experts' judgments) was higher when teachers majored in German Studies.

Eviction Court Outcomes and Access to Procedural Knowledge: Evidence From a Tenant-Focused Intervention in New Orleans

During the legal eviction process, tenants tend to lack procedural knowledge about how courts operate and how to argue their case. Uneven access to this information tends to result in less favorable outcomes for tenants, including a mark on the tenant’s record that severely limits future housing opportunities. However, there are few—if any—quantitative studies that systematically examine the relationship between knowledge distribution and eviction case outcomes. This article focuses on the unique efforts of a New Orleans-based renters’ rights organization to contact residents facing eviction and provide them with informative resources on the eviction process. We follow the court outcomes of 267 cases, and analyze them using a quasi-experimental approach and a series of weighted logistic regressions. For tenants who were contacted, we observe a 13% reduction in the probability of receiving a rule absolute judgment than among those who were not contacted. Direct forms of contact (e.g., a telephone conversation) tend to have stronger associations with positive court outcomes than indirect forms (e.g., sending a postcard).

Untypical Contrast Normalization Explains the "Weak Outnumber Strong" Numerosity Illusion.

Less salient, lower contrast disks appear to be more numerous than more salient, higher contrast disks when intermingled in equal numbers into the same display (Lei and Reeves, 2018), but they are equal in perceived numerosity when segregated into different displays. Comparative judgements indicate that the apparent numerosity of the lower contrast disks is unaffected by being intermingled with high contrast disks, whereas the high contrast disks are reduced in numerosity by being intermingled with the low contrast ones (Lei and Reeves, 2018). Here, we report that this illusion also occurs for absolute judgements of the numerosities of displays of from 20 to 80 disks. A model based on luminance-difference contrast normalization (LDCN) explains the illusory loss of high-contrast (salient) items along with veridical perception of the low-contrast ones. The model correctly predicts that perceived numerosity is linearly related to the square-root of the number of disks, with the extent of the illusion depending on an attentionally-weighted function of contrast and assimilation.