ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for the importance of specifying stimulus properties in psychologists attempt to be analytic about unanalyzed perceptions. It aims that an equally important type of analytic approach is that of specifying and using many different tasks in psychologists’ experiments on perception and information processing. Reality can be more complicated than information obtainable from simple inputs can tell us, so psychologists seek more information to clarify the nature of that more complex reality. Epistemology is, of course, a long-standing discipline concerned with the nature of knowing. The use of tasks with different demands on the organism will have two primary consequences: the differentiation of process, and a set of converging operations that help clarify the nature of the configural properties themselves. The letters for each task state which particular stimuli are used, and the slash indicates how the stimuli are to be dichotomized in the sorting.
