paired comparison

n. 1. In sensation research, a method of measuring some aspect of sensation in which pairs of stimuli are presented so that every stimulus is paired with every other stimulus and each pair is judged on the aspect of the sensation under study. Thus one might make six pots of soup which differ only in how much salt is in the recipe and then ask people to taste each possible pair of the soups and say which they like better. This procedure can establish an ordinal scale of the dimension being measured so that in the example one can find out which soup each person likes best.