Context is important but it does not explain everything: A comment on "Matching performance and the similarity structure of the stimulus set" by Crist.
Raymond S. Nickerson · Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 1981
Crist's experiments provide convincing evidence of the importance of context in letter-matching tasks. His detailed analysis also demonstrates how the reporting of central tendency measures on data aggregated over different stimuli can sometimes lead to an oversimplified view of the processes involved. His rationale for the experiments and his theoretical treatment of his results are criticized in this review, however, as unnecessarily polarizing the analytic and contextual views of perceptual matching and as overstating the case for context as a sufficient explanatory construct. Crist's results suggest both general and specific contextual similarity effects; a possible theoretical account is outlined.