COMPATIBILITY AND THE USE OF INFORMATION-PROCESSING STRATEGIES

When a prominent attribute looms larger in one response procedure than in another, a violation of procedure invariance occurs. A hypothesis based on compatibility between the structure of the input information and the required output was tested as an explanation of this phenomeno n. It was also compared with other existing hypotheses in the field. T he study-had two aims: (1) to illustrate the prominence effect in a se lection of preference tasks (choice, acceptance decisions, and prefere nce ratings); (2) to demonstrate the processing differences in a match ing procedure versus the selected preference tasks. Hence, verbal prot ocols were collected in both a matching task and in subsequent prefere nce tasks. Silent control conditions were also employed. The structure compatibility hypothesis was confirmed in that a prominence effect ob tained in the preference tasks was accompanied by a lower degree of at tention to the attribute levels in these tasks. Furthermore, as predic ted from the structure compatibility hypothesis, it was found that few er comparisons between attribute levels were performed in the preferen ce tasks than in the matching task. It was therefore concluded that bo th these processing differences may explain the occurrence of the prom inence effects. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.