Judgments of Sameness and Difference: Experiments on Decision Time

Abstract

When asked to judge whether two stimuli (tones) were the "same" or "different," subjects took longer to decide that two identical stimuli were the same than to decide that two dissimilar stimuli were different. Thus these judgments are not equivalent obverse aspects of a unitary judgmental process. While decision theory can be extended to deal with the obtained data, a model based on an analogy with a statistical computer is more directly applicable.