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The relationship of variance to interaction contrast in parallel systems factorial technology
Author(s) -
Townsend James T.,
Diederich Adele
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
british journal of mathematical and statistical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.157
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 2044-8317
pISSN - 0007-1102
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8317.1996.tb01085.x
Subject(s) - contrast (vision) , conjecture , variance (accounting) , monotonic function , factorial , statistic , mathematics , function (biology) , statistics , computer science , discrete mathematics , artificial intelligence , mathematical analysis , accounting , evolutionary biology , business , biology
Mean interaction contrast has been shown to be a beneficial statistic for testing between serial and parallel processes (e.g. Schweickert, 1978; Sternberg, 1969; Townscnd, 1984). The present theoretical note investigates a conjecture of Egeth & Dagenbach (1991) that the mean interaction contrast is largest when the parallel processes are each deterministic, that is possessing zero variance. We show that their conjecture is true in certain situations but not in others. We further demonstrate that the magnitude of mean interaction contrast may be a non‐monotonic function of processing time variance. Finally, implications for experimentation are pointed out.