RELATIONAL PSYCHOPHYSICS: MULTIDIMENSIONAL ASPECTS OF COMPARATIVE PERCEPTION

Whereas the contextual basis of all psychophysical responding is well founded, the compound influence of sensory and perceptual frames of reference constitutes a challenging issue in comparative one- and multidimensional psychophysics (e.g. Sarris, 2001, 2004, 2006). We refer to previous investigations which tested the assumption that the chicken’s relational choice is systematically altered by context conditions similar to findings stemming from human participants (Hauf, 2001; Hauf & Sarris, 2001a, b). In Experiment 1 the asymmetry of the training and the test stimuli varying along a single dimension was investigated by means of a two-stimulus two-choice paradigm. Many objects differ in two or more dimensions, therefore the question of Experiment 2 was whether different relational choice strategies exist when, say, two psychophysical dimensions are used simultaneously; accordingly, the one-dimensional paradigm was extended to a four-stimulus two-choice setup. In this paper the common and heterogeneous findings of this line of comparative research are presented and discussed (“configurality”). While perceptual relativism is a basic characteristic of all animal and human behavior, th