THURSTONIAN MODELS AND VARIANCE II: EXPERIMENTAL CONFIRMATION OF THE EFFECTS OF VARIANCE ON THURSTONIAN MODELS OF SCALING

ABSTRACT Subjects rated taste intensities using category scales under a variety of experimental protocols, which induced differences in computed values of d′. These were explained in a Thurstonian/signal detection context, by variation in the effects of adaptation changing perceived intensities (perceptual variance), by the effects of forgetting (memory variance) and by differences in the idiosyncratic ways that subjects use category‐rating scales (boundary variance).