Cue validity

Cue validity is the conditional probability that an object falls in a particular category given a particular feature or cue. The term was popularized by Beach (1964), Reed (1972) and especially by Eleanor Rosch in her investigations of the acquisition of so-called basic categories (Rosch & Mervis 1975;Rosch 1978). Cue validity is the conditional probability that an object falls in a particular category given a particular feature or cue. The term was popularized by Beach (1964), Reed (1972) and especially by Eleanor Rosch in her investigations of the acquisition of so-called basic categories (Rosch & Mervis 1975;Rosch 1978). Formally, the cue validity of a feature f i   {displaystyle f_{i} } with respect to category c j   {displaystyle c_{j} } has been defined in the following ways: For the definitions based on probability, a high cue validity for a given feature means that the feature or attribute is more diagnostic of the class membership than a feature with low cue validity. Thus, a high-cue validity feature is one which conveys more information about the category or class variable, and may thus be considered as more useful for identifying objects as belonging to that category. Thus, high cue validity expresses high feature informativeness. For the definitions based on linear correlation, the expression of 'informativeness' captured by the cue validity measure is not the full expression of the feature's informativeness (as in mutual information, for example), but only that portion of its informativeness that is expressed in a linear relationship. For some purposes, a bilateral measure such as the mutual information or category utility is more appropriate than the cue validity. As an example, consider the domain of 'numbers' and allow that every number has an attribute (i.e., a cue) named 'is_positive_integer', which we call f p - i n t   {displaystyle f_{p{mbox{-}}int} } , and which adopts the value 1 if the number is actually a positive integer. Then we can inquire what the validity of this cue is with regard to the following classes: {rational number, irrational number, even integer}: In perception, 'cue validity' is often short for ecological validity of a perceptual cue, and is defined as a correlation rather than a probability (see above). In this definition, an uninformative perceptual cue has an ecological validity of 0 rather than 0.5.