Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Qualitative judgment, the ability to evaluate attributes that imply some degree of 'goodness' or preference, poses important problems for the information processing paradigm. In this paper one form of qualitative judgment, contextual judgment of magnitude, is analysed in some detail. The results of psychophysical experiments are consistent with the idea that human magnitude representation is based on a contextual coding process in which an actual stimulus is compared with a sample of traces of previously encountered similar stimuli. Such a coding process is hard to realize in a conventional memory system. A distributed model for contextual magnitude judgment is described, in which this trace sampling process is feasible, when special provisions for the use of resonance information are made. Resonance coding involves the representation within a memory system of the memory activity caused by specific patterns of stimulation. A possible implementation of resonance coding, detection of dissonance, is briefly described. The hypothesis is put forward that evaluation of memory resonance plays an equally important role in other forms of qualitative judgment.