Our study adds a relational perspective to the hitherto mostly informational and motivational focus in studying social comparison mechanisms linked to RPI systems.
As discussed below, maintaining a cortical representation of current state may involve more complex, comparison mechanisms.
By looking at the variation in the performance scores, we have tried to include social comparison mechanisms into the analysis.
In the case of QoL of older adults, adaptation and comparison mechanisms pose a challenge to measurement and may cause unexpected ways of responding [ 12, 24– 28].
In that sense, changes differ in salience and infrequent changes may require different comparison mechanisms, e.g. searching for a violation in a rule rather than serial comparison of elements, or more sustained attention to specific locations in images.
Also comparison mechanisms such as relative deprivation may have contributed to the findings, reflecting that people fall behind comparable others and their own expectations with regard to income [ 22– 22].
