Implicit alternatives to a stimulus, difficulty of encoding, and schema-plus-correction representation

Abstract

Garner has hypothesized that a S exposed to a stimulus infers alternatives to it. Data are reviewed which establish a elose correlation between the number of implicit alternatives to astimulus and the difficulty of encoding that stimulus. This correlation provides a datum to be explained and suggests that the identification of specific implicit alternatives may provide elues to the encoding process. For dot patterns of a certain kind, it has been suggested that the rotations and reflections of a stimulus are its only alternatives, but a elose examination of certain data indicates that, for many of these patterns, the alternatives also inelude one or rnore other patterns which differ from the stimulus only in the position of a single dot and which locate that dot in a position where it is more predictable from the other dots. It is suggested that the one-dot-different alternatives represent schemas used in schema-plus-correction encoding.

On domain differences in categorization and context variety

“…In this extension of the use theory of meaning (Wittgenstein, 1953), imagined alternative uses of language terms also affect their perceived meaning. It has long been established that participants spontaneously come up with alternatives for the stimuli they are confronted with (Bear, 1974;Garner, 1966). Many decision-making theories incorporate the assumption that the mental availability of these alternatives influences the decisions that are to be made with regard to these stimuli (e.g., Kahneman & Miller, 1986;Tversky & Koehler, 1994;Windschitl & Wells, 1998).…”