Measuring The Cognitive Structures Of Pre-School Children: A Multidimensional Scaling Analysis Of Classification Performance And Similarity Estimation.

The purpose of the research was to measure the cognitive structures of five and six-year old children using a sorting task commonly employed by Piaget and also using a similarity estimation task. Multidimensional scaling techniques were used to analyze both sets of data. The similarity analysis revealed that 92% of the children had stable, organized cognitive structures for the experimental stimuli while an analysis of the sorting data (for the same students) indicated that only 30% of these children had stable structures. The study strongly suggests that the demand characteristics of sorting tasks make them relatively poor techniques for evaluating cognitive structures in children as compared with similarity tasks.

Self-perception among narcotic addicts: an exploratory study employing multidimensional scaling techniques.

The self-perception of narcotic addicts was investigated using multidimensional scaling techniques. Subjects consisted of two groups of narcotic addicts and one groups of treatment personnel at a federal addiction treatment facility. One group of addict subjects was newly admitted to the treatment center, while the other group had been in treatment for 3 to 5 months. All Ss judged the similarity of pairs of "stimulus people" representing several personality dimensions thought to be relevant to the study of narcoticaddiction. The judgment were analyzed using the INDSCAL, an individual differences scaling procedure. The data for all groups are adequately explained by a three-dimensional solution. Interpretations of the dimensions and their relative importance to the self-perception of the different groups are discussed.

PATTERN PERCEPTION, CONCEPTUAL SPACES, AND DIMENSIONAL LIMITATIONS ON INFORMATION PROCESSING.

A conceptual space was defined as the collection of all linearly inde- pendent psychological dimensions underlying the multidimensional scaling of a set of tasks. When a single subject scaled a sample of random polygons under fifteen different task conditions, a total of ten linearly independent dimensions was obtained. The number of obtained dimensions in individual tasks ranged between 1 and 3. The results suggest the existence o f a dimensional limitation upon information processing in MDS studies.