Classifying intergral stimuli.

Two reported experiments support holistic, as opposed to analytic, processing models for integral stimuli. Speeded classification data from different information-processing tasks (univariate and correlated) were predicted by distance between stimuli in similarity space but not by redundancy. The results of the filtering and condensation tasks and the notion of configural stimuli are also explicable in these terms. It is shown that some operational definitions commonly used to define integral stimuli are usually confounded with stimulus similarity. The assumption of independence between the attributes that combine to form multidimensional stimuli is not always met and is always an empirical question. When these attributes are not independent, physical and psychological spaces are not necessarily the same. Similarity structure is a crucial concern if inferences of cognitive processing are to be based on information-processing task results.