categorical variable

a variable that is defined by a set of two or more categories. Examples include a person’s sex, marital status, or rankings of particular stimuli (such as the relative loudness of different sounds). Specialized methods of categorical data analysis are available for assessing information obtained from the measurement of categorical variables.

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Psychology term of the day

November 18th 2024

ambiguous figure

a visual stimulus that can be interpreted in more than one way, such as an embedded figure or a reversible figure. A well-known example is the young girl–old woman image, in which the black-and-white drawing sometimes appears to be of a young girl and sometimes of an old lady. This phenomenon is not restricted to the visual: An ambiguous stimulus is one of any sensory modality that can have multiple interpretations.