Abstract
Two experiments compared the influence of an anchor stimulus on judgments of size using a category-scaling procedure and two ratio-scaling procedures—Stevens' magnitude estimation and direct size estimation. Using an anchor stimulus smaller than any of the judged series stimuli (Exp. I) produced slight contrast effects for category scaling, assimilation for size estimation and no anchoring effects with magnitude estimation. The downward concave relationship between the category scale and the ratio scales was not obtained under any anchoring condition. Use of an anchor stimulus larger than the judged series (Exp. II) produced similar results, with the exception that size estimation did not show consistent assimilation effects.
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