Analysis Of Size Of The Matching Circle

In this experiment, a participant was presented with multiple stimuluses consisting of different sized circles. The target circles ranged in size, with a radius of 10-, 30-, or 50-pixels, and the participant would then use a slider to adjust the matching circle to the size of the target circle. The target circle’s size varied from one trial to the next, with each size having a total of 10 trials, which made up the total sample size of 30 trials for each subject. For this experiment, the independent variable is the size of the target circle, and the dependent variable is the size of the matching circle (Sage, 2016). The main goal of this experiment is to capture both the accuracy and the precision of a subject in matching circle sizes, measured …show more content…
This is based on Weber’s Law, which is concerned with the amount that a physical stimulus would need to change before there is an awareness of a difference, or in distinguishing a change (Hergenhahn & Henley, 2014). Basically, there should be a noticeable and systematic increase in the standard deviation based on an increase in size of the target circle, while the matching circle mean should stay close to the actual physical size of the target circle. In other words, it should be possible to see a progressive and regular increase in the standard deviation from a 10-, to a 30-, to a 50-pixel circle; and alternately, a systematic decrease in the standard deviation when moving in the opposite direction from 50- down to a 10-pixel circle. Global data was collected from 561 participants, with each of the participants following the same pattern of trials as mentioned …show more content…
The means from the global data are comparable in scope to the means from a single participant, indicating a high accuracy between the matching and target circles. The standard deviation for the global data differs from that of a single participant in that the numbers do increase along with the size of the circles. Table 2 shows a standard deviation of .941 for the 10-pixel circle, 1.627 for the 30-pixel circle, and 2.006 for the 50-pixel circle. This is in line with the expected outcome of Weber’s Law and confirms the hypothesis. Namely that the mean size of the matching circle should be close to the actual physical size of the target circle, and that the deviations from the mean should become larger as the physical size of the target circle increases. Therefore, although the single participant study rejected this hypothesis, the multi-participant study confirmed the hypothesis. Further research would be needed to determine the exact cause of this discrepancy and how it would apply to Weber’s