Space Builder

Build a perceptual space. See the data it produces. Find out if we can recover it.

In plain English

Imagine identifying a face as happy or sad and male or female at the same time. GRT says each face lands somewhere in a two-dimensional "perceptual space", a cloud, not a point, because perception is noisy. You respond by asking which side of each line the cloud landed on.

Two things can go wrong with independence. The clouds can move: if a face's happiness changes depending on whether it's male, the dimensions aren't separable. The clouds can tilt: if noisy-happy and noisy-male travel together on a given trial, the dimensions aren't independent. Drag the sliders and watch both happen.

The perceptual space you built

Each ellipse is one stimulus: a 1-SD contour of where it lands in perceptual space on a given trial. The dashed cross is the decision bound, you respond by asking which quadrant you fell into.

Read the marginals. Each dimension's two curves of the same colour are the same level of that dimension, paired with the two different levels of the other one (solid vs dotted). If they sit on top of each other, that dimension is separable. If they pull apart, it isn't.

The data that space produces

Exact response probabilities implied by the space above, this is what you'd get with infinitely many trials.