Abstract
A highly structured set of stimuli was used in this study. Each stimulus had four binary attributes, whose values were determined so that any two stimuli could be transformed into each other by changing values of one or more attributes. In one experiment, 93 undergraduates rated similarity of paired stimuli. In another experiment, the same subjects learned three stimuli which were presented one after another for 10 seconds each. Later, in the recognition task, they made “old” or “new” judgment and rated the confidence of their judgment for each of the test stimuli. Two groups of subjects served the two experiments in different order. The results showed that (1) the rated similarity between the paired stimuli is a monotonically decreasing function of the number of transformations needed to get the pair equal, (2) the recognition confidence for new stimuli is significantly higher for stimuli generated by relevant transformations from the learned stimuli than for stimuli not so generated. The results support a model of memory-representation-generation (Suto, 1987, 1988), but not “prototype plus transformation model” nor “context model”.
