title: Decisional difficulty in pattern discrimination.
abstract: To assess the relative influence of decisional ambiguity and response uncertainty on task difficulty, a pattern discrimination task was presented to 60 college undergraduates. The comparison stimuli were nine 20 X 20 matrices of randomly assigned black and white squares, with percent of black squares varying evenly from 10% to 90%. The standard contained 50% black squares. In a low-response uncertainty condition there were two response categories, and five in a high uncertainty condition. It was hypothesized that decisional ambiguity should be greatest at the boundaries between categories. The results suggested that decisional ambiguity was the critical factor determining judgment difficulty.
mesh_terms: D003657:Decision Making; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time