As postal cards are generally manufactured
in sets, it is not difficult to purchase pairs of pictures with any
degree of similarity. Two cards with Christmas trees, or two with
Easter eggs, or two with football players, or two with forest
landscapes, and so on, may differ all the way from a slight variation
of color or a hardly noticeable change in the position of details to
variations which keep the same motive or the same general arrangement,
but after all make the card strikingly different. The first step is to
determine for each pair the degree of similarity, on a percentage
basis. To overcome mere arbitrariness, we ask thirty to forty educated
persons to express the similarity value, calling identical postal
cards 100 per cent and two postal cards as different as a colored
flower piece and a black picture of a street scene O. The average
value of these judgments is then considered as expressing the
objective degree of similarity between the two pictures of a pair.
After securing such standard values, we carry on the experiments in
the following form. Six different postal cards, for instance, are seen
on a black background through the opening of a shutter which is closed
after 5 seconds. The six may be made up of a landscape, a building, a
head, a genre scene, and so forth. After 20 seconds the same group of
postal cards is shown once more, except that one is replaced by a
similar one, instead of one church another church building, or instead
of a vase with roses a vase with pinks.
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