Visual pattern matching: Effects of size ratio, complexity, and similarityin simultaneous and successive matching

An experiment on mental transformation of size, in pairwise comparison of s imultaneously or successively presented figures with respect to shape, is r eported. Regardless of type of presentation (simultaneous vs. successive), figural complexity, and similarity within pairs of different-shaped figures , median latencies of both same and different responses were approximately linearly increasing functions of the Linear size ratio between the patterns to be compared. The slopes of the functions showed significant effects of figural complexity and similarity for simultaneous but not for successive m atching. The results suggest that successive matching was done by encoding a subpattern of the first stimulus in a pair as a mental image, transformin g the image to the size format of the other stimulus, and then testing for a match; in simultaneous matching the process of encoding, transformation, and comparison appeared to be executed several times for each pair of figur es. The interpretation was illustrated by a random walk model, which provid ed a good fit to the results.