S. Dopkins et al., ROLE OF AN ABSTRACT ORDER SCHEMA IN CONCEPTUAL JUDGMENT, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 20(6), 1994, pp. 1283-1295
Ss performed same-different judgments for which order information was
logically irrelevant. In Experiments 1 and 2, the stimuli for the judg
ment task were derived from an ordered set of concepts from long-term
memory (U.S. presidents ordered on the dimension of historical time);
in Experiments 3 and 4 the stimuli were derived from two ordered sets
of concepts. In the stimulus set for each experiment, there were sever
al associate phrases for each concept and the task was to judge whethe
r the phrases were paired with the same concept (Experiments 1, 2, and
3) or the same ordering (Experiment 4). The time to respond ''differe
nt'' decreased with the ordinal distance between the concepts even whe
n the concepts belonged to different orderings. It is concluded that s
ame-different judgments are based in part on amodal order information
(i.e., not tied to any particular dimension). Two models of the implic
ated order schema are proposed and tested.