Visual and nominal matching of physically dimensioned polygons.

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that as the visual salience of stimuli decreases, the use of nominal representations as a basis for matching forms increases. The visual salience manipulation was based upon psychophysical studies showing that the dimension compactness possesses higher visual salience for the human observer than the dimension jaggedness. Subjects were asked to judge whether two successively presented forms were the same or different with respect to their position on the compactness or jaggedness dimension. Reaction times suggested an inverse relationship between the use of nominal representations and the visual salience of the dimension employed as a criterion for matching.