Jim Davies: Publications: Consistent Contrast and Correlation in Free Sorting

Billman, D. & Davies, J. (2005). Consistent contrast and correlation in free sorting. American Journal of Psychology. 118 (3), pp. 353--383.

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People will make hierarchical category structures if there is hierarchy present in the stimuli to be sorted.
People are sensitive to correlational structure in stimuli in free-categorization tasks.
People appear to be insensitive to "family resemblence" categories in other experiments because the correlations were low and difficult to perceive.
People value consistent contrast (that similar attributes are important across different categories) in making categories.

Publisher: Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

BibTex Entry:

@Article{BillmanDavies2005,
  author = 	 {Dorrit Billman and Jim Davies},
  title = 	 {Consistent contrast and correlation in free sorting},
  journal = 	 {American Journal of Psychology},
  year = 	 {2005},
  key = 	 {},
  volume = 	 {118},
  number = 	 {3},
  pages = 	 {353--283},
  annote = 	 {}
}

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Abstract

Two experiments investigated the free sort strategies used for multi-attribute (6 or 9) drawings of alien animals. In previous research, with simpler stimulus structure than ours, participants seemed to be insensitive to correlational structure in the stimuli because they predominately produced "1D sorts," based on the values of just one dimension, or attribute. Both our experiments showed that participants used many strategies, but preferred to generate groupings that reflected the correlational structure in input, when this did not violate consistent contrast. The second experiment used hierarchically structured stimuli to show that participants. sort-strategies favor consistency within a set of contrasting categories, distinct from any preference for 1D sorting. Finally, both experiments show that correlational sorts are much more likely when the correlation-based sort contrasts consistently vs. inconsistently. Our data show complexity at work in free sort tasks: people are sensitive to multiple and sometimes conflicting biases for consistency and correlational structure in the category systems they create.

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JimDavies ( jim@jimdavies.org )