The role of part-whole information in reasoning about relative size

Models of comparative judgment have assumed that relative magnitude is computed from knowledge about absolute magnitude rather than retrieved directly. In Experiment 1, participants verified the relative size of part-whole pairs (e.g., tree-leaf) and unrelated controls (e.g., tree-penny). The symbolic distance effect was much smaller for part-whole pairs than for unrelated controls. In two subsequent experiments, participants determined either which of two objects was closer in size to a third object or which of two pairs had a greater difference in the size of its constituents. In contrast to the paired comparison task in Experiment 1, judgments of part-whole items were more sensitive to the influence of symbolic distance than were unrelated controls. The fact that the part-whole relation attenuates the effects of symbolic distance in a paired comparison task but not in tasks that require an explicit comparison of size differences suggests that the part-whole relation provides a source of information about relative magnitude that does not depend on knowledge about absolute magnitude.