As rapid, holistic methods for similarity and description—such as sorting and projective mapping—have grown in popularity, a limiting factor is the number of samples that can be presented to subjects: more than 25 food samples decreases the quality and stability of results. While incomplete-block designs could address this, their use has not been developed for these holistic methods. In this paper we present an empirical investigation into the use of incomplete-block designs with free sorting and the newer free linking. We compare these two methods because while their results are comparable, the cognitive tasks are different, and thus their suitability for incomplete-block designs may differ. We evaluated the effects of incomplete-block designs in two studies. In Study 1, 20 subjects evaluated 6/10 chocolate bars by free linking in an incomplete-block design, with each subject completing 2 blocks; results were compared to a complete-block evaluation of the 10 bars by free sorting and free linking. In Study 2, a total of 90 subjects evaluated 62 terms from a chocolate flavor-wheel in 3 conditions (between subjects): free sorting with complete blocks (N = 30, all 62 terms) and free sorting (N = 30) or free linking (N = 30) with 3 incomplete blocks of 16/62 terms. We introduce a novel method to evaluate stability for the incomplete-block designs that we call “pairwise simulation.” From Study 1, we find that pairwise simulation provides adequate stability estimates and that, with sufficient pairwise cooccurrences, free linking with incomplete blocks produces results that are comparable to free sorting or linking with complete blocks. From Study 2, we demonstrate that free linking with incomplete blocks can produce high quality results from a large sample set, maintaining the increased discrimination capacity that marks free linking in general, and that with incomplete blocks, free linking is likely to be more stable than free sorting. This research demonstrates that incomplete-block designs can be used with free linking, and also provides a new, effective method through pairwise simulation for evaluating stability with incomplete-block designs, which cannot be resampled using standard bootstrapping approaches.

随着快速、整体的相似性和描述方法（例如排序和投影映射）越来越流行，一个限制因素是可以向受试者提供的样本数量：超过 25 个食品样本会降低结果的质量和稳定性。虽然不完整的模块设计可以解决这个问题，但它们的使用尚未针对这些整体方法进行开发。在本文中，我们对具有自由排序和更新的自由链接的不完整块设计的使用进行了实证研究。我们比较这两种方法，因为虽然它们的结果具有可比性，但认知任务不同，因此它们对不完整块设计的适用性可能不同。我们在两项研究中评估了不完全区组设计的影响。在研究 1 中，20 名受试者通过不完整块设计中的自由连接评估了 6/10 巧克力棒，每个受试者完成 2 个块；通过自由排序和自由链接将结果与 10 个条的完整块评估进行比较。在研究 2 中，共有 90 名受试者在 3 种条件下（受试者之间）评估了巧克力风味轮中的 62 个术语：完整块的自由排序（N = 30，所有 62 个术语）和自由排序（N = 30）或自由排序连接 (N = 30) 3 个不完整的 16/62 项块。我们引入了一种新方法来评估不完整模块设计的稳定性，我们称之为“成对模拟”。从研究 1 中，我们发现成对模拟提供了足够的稳定性估计，并且通过足够的成对共现，与不完整块的自由链接产生的结果与自由排序或与完整块的链接相当。从研究 2 中，我们证明，与不完整块的自由连接可以从大样本集中产生高质量的结果，保持一般标记自由连接的增加的辨别能力，并且对于不完整的块，自由连接可能比不完整的块更稳定。免费排序。这项研究表明，不完整模块设计可以与自由链接一起使用，并且还通过成对仿真提供了一种新的有效方法，用于评估不完整模块设计的稳定性，这些设计无法使用标准自举方法进行重新采样。