THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSIONALITY OF BASIC ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS:II. INTERPRETATION OF THE STATISTICAL DIMENSIONS

摘要

This is the second of a series of reports presenting the results of applying multidimensional scaling techniques to the analysis of the conceptual difficulty associated with basic electronic circuits.nTwo multidimensional scaling techniques were applied to thirteen basic electronic circuits. One technique was the standard technique, in which Ss judged the proximity of the circuits with one another;the second was a new technique, in which the proximity judgments were restricted to a "conceptual difficulty" referent. The dimensional structures of these two sets of data were analyzed and compared. The comparison showed that the two techniques yielded different dimensional structures.nIn a somewhat novel approach to interpreting these dimensional structures, a factor analysis was performed on the thirteen circuits scaled on ten common circuit characteristics. The factor analysis yielded three factors which were labeled "experiential," "complexity," and "waveform," these labels are representative of the circuit characteristics with high loadings on each factor.