Elsevier

Cognitive Psychology

Volume 7, Issue 4, October 1975, Pages 532-547
Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive reference points

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(75)90021-3Get rights and content

Abstract

Two methods were used to test the hypothesis that natural categories (such as colors, line orientations, and numbers) have reference point stimuli (such as focal colors, vertical and horizontal lines, and numbers that are multiples of 10) in relation to which other stimuli of the category are judged. In Experiment I, subjects placed pairs of stimuli into sentence frames consisting of linguistic “hedges” such as “— is essentially—.” Results were that the supposed reference stimuli were most often placed in the second (reference) slot. In Experiment II, the subject placed a stimulus in physical space to represent his feeling of the psychological distance of that stimulus from another spatially fixed stimulus. Results showed that, when supposed reference stimuli were fixed, other stimuli were placed closer to them than vice versa. The results have substantive implications for the understanding of internal structure of categories and methodological implications for the mapping of reference points, quantification of linguistic intuitions, and the assumption of symmetry in psychological distance judgments.

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This research was supported in part by a grant to the author (under her former name Eleanor Rosch Heider) by the National Science Foundation GB-38245X, in part by a grant from the Grant Foundation, and in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health 1 RO1 MH24316-01.

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