ABSTRACT

Successful participants in discrimination experiments can distinguish two stimulus classes, but in most paradigms they need not be able to name them. In this chapter, we extend detection theory to encompass experiments in which stimuli drawn from large sets are named or classified by the observer. These sets are “one-dimensional,” that is, they contain stimuli that differ for the participant in just one characteristic. As in earlier chapters, we are interested in sensitivity and bias, but multiple parameters must be estimated, and their interpretation is somewhat different.