Name: Zhaoyu Wang
Master’s Thesis Defense Meeting
Date: Monday, August 14th, 2023
Time: 1:00 PM
Zoom Meeting link: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/94351191122
Zoom Meeting ID: 94351191122
Advisor: James Roberts, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Thesis Committee Members:
Susan Embretson, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Daniel Spieler, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)
Title: Is Dimensional Salience in Perception and Preference Related?
Abstract: Is the dimensional salience or the perceptual importance of alternative object characteristics quantified in multidimensional scaling techniques related to the seemingly analogous quantity in unfolding models of individual preference for those same objects? In other words, if an individual does not weigh differences in two objects on a single dimension, then this suggests these two objects would be equally preferred on the basis of only that single dimension because they are perceptually similar. However, just because an individual attends to a perceptual difference between two objects, does not necessarily mean that the perceived difference will ultimately affect the individual’s relative preference for the two objects unless the dimension on which those differences occur is important to the individual’s preference generation process.
Our goal is to investigate how dimensional salience in perception and preference are related to each other using data from an emotion study conducted with 24 stimuli. The dimensional salience in perception and preference are empirically measured using the individual weights in the output of INDSCAL (Individual Difference Scaling) and the coefficients from the External Multidimensional Unfolding Model (EMUM), respectively.
After that, we applied the Independent Samples T-test and F-test to examine differences in average preferential and perceptual salience, and also the variation in preferential preference relative to the amount of perceptual salience. There is a substantive body of literature about the salience of alternative dimensions which influence preference judgments in several research fields such as marketing and economics, while few studies exist about salience measurement in psychology. This study contributes to the literature about dimensional salience in perception and preference within psychology, as well as the measurement of both perceptions and preferences in the domain of facial emotion.