Pattern goodness and redundancy revisited: Multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering analyses

Abstract

Twenty subjects made all possible (136) pairwise-comparison judgments of pattern goodness between 17 five-dot patterns. Using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering analyses, a two-dimensional representation was judged the most appropriate for the derived pattern space. The interpreted structure of the spatial-hierarchical configuration strongly supported previous findings that pattern redundancy is the most salient dimension underlying pattern goodness judgments and that patterns can be partitioned on this dimension according to the size of their equivalence sets, i.e., the number of patterns resulting from rigid rotations in 90-deg increments or reflection. A psychological mechanism that accounts for the effect of pattern redundancy on judged goodness was proposed. © 1975 Psychonomic Society, Inc.