Mignault Alain, Marley A A J, Chaudhuri Avi
Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, H3A 1B1 Canada.
Percept Psychophys. 2008 Oct;70(7):1274-88. doi: 10.3758/PP.70.7.1274.
Researchers studying absolute identification have long known that it takes more time to identify a stimulus in the middle of a range than one at the extremes. That is, there is an inverted-U relation between mean response time and response position. In this task, an inverted-U relation also exists between response uncertainty and response position. Similarly, an inverted-U relation between mean response time and response position has been found for psychometric measures involving questions about the self. However, psychophysicists explain these inverted-U effects differently than do self-schema researchers. We propose an integrative framework in which task constraints explain these effects. To verify the generality of these inverted-U effects, we hypothesized that they would exist in three tasks having similar constraints--in this case, tasks involving the judgment of subjective properties of faces on a Likert-type scale. Our results are consistent with this hypothesis. We discuss the relevance of the results for other applications of Likert-type scales.
长期以来，研究绝对识别的研究人员都知道，识别范围中间的刺激比识别极端的刺激需要更多时间。也就是说，平均反应时间与反应位置之间存在倒U形关系。在这项任务中，反应不确定性与反应位置之间也存在倒U形关系。同样，在涉及自我问题的心理测量中，也发现了平均反应时间与反应位置之间的倒U形关系。然而，心理物理学家对这些倒U形效应的解释与自我图式研究者不同。我们提出了一个综合框架，其中任务限制解释了这些效应。为了验证这些倒U形效应的普遍性，我们假设它们会存在于具有相似限制的三项任务中——在这种情况下，是涉及在李克特量表上对面部主观属性进行判断的任务。我们的结果与这一假设一致。我们讨论了这些结果与李克特量表其他应用的相关性。
