Area and Randomness Estimates of Complex Stimuli

Abstract

On the basis of previous work a negative relationship was hypothesized between stimulus complexity and the exponent of the power function for area estimates. The present study pursued a variant of this hypothesis by comparing randomness estimates of targets with the value of the exponent for area estimates. Two experiments showed that a decrease in the exponent is linked with an increase in randomness estimates. It is suggested that this relationship is due to differential memory constraints imposed by stimuli of differing complexity.