A Quantitative Study of Relevance in the Formation of Adaptation Levels

Abstract

Quantitative measures of relevance as shown by changes in adaptation levels (AL) resulting from the influence of prior stimulation on subsequent judgments of a standard set of circles show that pooling is a matter of degree, and hence that relevance is not an all-or-none matter. What will be relevant cannot be decided on purely a priori grounds, e.g., on the basis of perceptual similarity. While similarity plays an important role, other factors that make relevant dimensions of stimuli more focal tend to influence subsequent judgments to a greater extent than mere dimensional similarity. Thus, angles enclosed in small circles exerted greater effects on judgments of large circles than did the same small circles without the enclosed angles, although the latter were more similar than the former to the large circles. Similarly, a response language in terms of acute-obtuse in judging the angles had greater effect than a small-large response language, even though the latter was identical with that used in judging the standard stimuli. Finally, with positive correlations between angles and their sides (degrees and length of sides) the pre-adaptation series yielded greater effects than were found with negative or zero correlations between these variables. The results of this study thus support the assumption that focal stimuli tend to exert greatest weight on the formation of internal norms, and, therefore, any condition that contributes to focalization influences the pooling process and thus can be said to be relevant to ensuing responses.