Cue validity

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Cue validity is the conditional probability that an object falls in a particular category given a particular feature (cue).

As regards categories, this means that some attributes are considered as more essential for a category than others. Thus, the notion of cue validity implies that attributes are differently weighted; some might be essential, others can be overridden with varying degrees of facility. Essential attributes have the highest cue validity for a certain category (Navarro 1998).

Thus a cue validity represents how valid a cue is when applied in making a binary decision. If a cue is extremely poor at predicting an outcome, it will have a validity of approximately chance 0.5. If a particular cue can, whenever used, successfully predict an outcome, that cue will have a value of 1. A value of 0 would imply the cue will correctly predict the opposite of what is expected.

For instance, if we know that a number is a positive integer we know that it is rational. Thus the cue validity for positive integers as a cue for the category of "rationals" is 1. Its cue validity, though, for the field of irrationals will be zero, and its cue validity for the category of even integers will be 0.5.

In perception, "cue validity" is often short for ecological validity of a perceptual cue, and is defined as a correlation rather than a probability. An uninformative perceptual cue has an ecological validity of 0, not 0.5.

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