Analog and semantic models of judgments about the months of the year

This study tested undergraduates’ ability to judge cyclic relations between the months of the year, days of the week, and buildings around a campus square. On each trial, a pair of month, day, or building names was presented. Subjects judged whether the second stimulus was closer to the first going forward or backward in time (or clockwise/counterclockwise around the square). For all three contents, response times and errors increased as the second stimulus approached the direction boundary. The results can be explained by the types of analog models used to account for the symbolic distance effect for bipolar continua. In contrast, semantic models of the symbolic distance effect appear to be poorly suited for explaining how cyclic comparisous are made.