
doi: 10.3758/bf03205872
pmid: 6844099
It is gratifying to have stimulated Wenderoth and Johnson (1982) to carry out four interesting experiments, although it appears that some of their comments arise from a misreading of the paper by MacRae and Loh (1981). I shall begin by clarifying those aspects of the paper that seem to have misled Wenderoth and Johnson and then report an analysis of some of our data in more detail than seemed to be warranted at the time the MacRae and Loh paper was written. The problem we studied was the frequently reported finding that subjects who have been asked to reproduce an angle make consistent errors such that acute angles are reproduced larger than they should be and obtuse angles are made too small. We argued that no purely perceptual error could account for such results and that attention had to focus on artifacts of experimental procedure or analysis. The results we obtained were a complete surprise to us because, in spite of eliminating likely artifacts, we found that the direction of the errors did still depend strongly on the size of the angle being matched. We had designed the study to try to pin down what we believed to be artifacts in one line of investigation. We tried to avoid some and to evaluate the contribution of others. Delay between viewing the standard and the variable looked like a prime candidate, as did relative position of the angles, orientation of the angle midlines, and the starting point for adjustment. In our experiment, we found the first three to be important, but not the fourth. Wenderoth and Johnson believe that conclusion to have resulted from a misinterpretation of our data. They think that the surprising effect of angle size on the preferred direction for errors of adjustment was an artifact of the starting position from which our subjects began their adjustments of the variable angle. That is not so, as our paper should have made clear. Since we evidently did not make the conclusion sufficiently plain, a more elaborate treatment of the data is given below. Wenderoth and Johnson chide us for not saying whether or not our subjects were permitted to "bracket" the final setting point-that is, to adjust
Discrimination Learning, Orientation, Psychophysics, Humans
Discrimination Learning, Orientation, Psychophysics, Humans
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