Similarity as distance: A structural principle for semantic memory.

Hutchinson, J. Wesley; Lockhead, Gregory R.

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.3.6.660

Cited by 56 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…We agree with Hutchinson and Lockhead (1977) that a spati*l representat ion provides a rather general form of representation for a variety of purposes, and with Hollan Smith, and Shoben (1975) have noted that the choice of representation serves a largely heuristic function, and in the present research, the spatial representation seems to have served this function reasonably well. Although we believe that subjects use a spatial representation in solving these problems, we also believe that other representations are available to subjects as they solve these (and other) problems , and that subjects make use of these alternative representations as needed.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Unities in inductive reasoning.

Sternberg¹,

Gardner²

1983

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

223

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Three experiments sought to discover sources of communalities in performance on three inductive reasoning tasks: analogies, series completions, and classifications. In Experiment 1, 30 subjects completed an untuned pencil-and-paper test in Which they were asked to solve 90 induction items with names of mammals as content. Items were equally divided among the three kinds of induction tasks noted above. The subjects' task was to rank order four response options in terms of their goodness of fit as completions for each particular item. Data sets for the three tasks were highly intercorrelated, and a single exponential model of response choice provided a good fit to each data set. In Experiment 2,36 subjects completed a timed test in which they, too, were asked to solve 90 mammal-name induction items. Items were again equally divided among the three kinds of induction tasks noted above. The subjects' task was to choose the better of two response options as a completion for each particular item. Data sets for the three tasks were again highly intercorrelated, and a single linear model of response times provided a good fit to each data set. In Experiment 3, 18 subjects were timed while solving 1,440 induction items with schematic picture, verbal, and geometric content. Items were apprpximately equally divided among the three kinds of induction tasks noted above. Both analysis of stimulus and of subject variance supported the notion of highly related performance algorithms on the three tasks. It was concluded that a common or highly similar model of response choice and of information processing can account for at least some of the previously observed relationships in performance across induction tasks. The implications of these findings for psychometric and information-processing accounts of induction and intelligence are discussed.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Unities in inductive reasoning.

Sternberg¹,

Gardner²

1983

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

223

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Since ratio and least are better than subtractive distance as predictors of RT, some of the between-/within-category effect in Figure 2 may be explainable as a ratio or least distance effect. Such an interpretation would seem to fit nicely with the results of Hutchinson and Lockhead (1977), who found that decisions about which of two named animals was more similar to a third were faster when the comparison animals were from the same category as the reference animal than when they were from different categories. Nonetheless, part of the between-/within-category effect in Figure 2 must also be due to some unique property of within-category triplets, such as peripheral chips always representing the correct choice.…”

Section: Other Distance Measuressupporting

confidence: 79%

Symbolic comparison of color similarity

Linde

Paivio

1979

Memory & Cognition

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This study investigated symbolic comparison of color similarity using a triplet paradigrn. Results showed that the time to choose which of two color samples is more similar to a color name was a function of several measures of distance between the samples relative to the focal color for the category name. Since colors appear to be represented in memory only as names and images and not as abstract entities such as features or propositions, these results provide support for models of symbolic comparison that assume that items are stored and compared as mental analogs. 141Recent research on the manner in whieh our knowledge of the world is represented in long-term memory has made use of a paradigm that involves comparative judgment of symbolic information. The participants in these experiments are shown a pair of stimuli, such as names or pietures of familiar objects or animals, and their task is to decide which of the two is, for example, larger in reallife.The basic finding from these experiments is a systematie decrease in the time required to choose between the two symbols as the psychologieal distance between them increases. For example, Moyer (1973) found that the reaction time (RT) to choose the larger of two named animals decreased as the difference in rated sizes of the animals increased. These results are similar to those obtained when subjects are asked to make size comparisons among physical stimuli actually presented (Curtis, Paulos, & Rule, 1973).Several findings within a variety of symbolic cornparison tasks permit strong inferences concerning the nature of symbolic information in long-terrn memory. Moyer (1973) suggested that his subjects made some kind of internal "psychophysical judgment" among analog memory representations. Such representations store our knowledge of the world in a form that is highly isomorphie with or analogous to perceptual knowledge (Attneave, 1972;Cooper & Shepard, 1973). They "contain" information that bears a continuous (analog) relation to the perceptua1 information aroused by the perceptual objects themselves. Paivio (1975) proposed that these analog representations may take the form of This research was supported by a postgraduate scholarship to the first author and Grant A0087 to the second author from the National Research Council of Canada. The authors thank lan Spence for his help in scaling the data. They also thank Keith Holyoak and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier version of this paper. Portions of this paper were presen ted at the annual meeting of the Canadian Psychological Association, Ottawa, JUDe 7-9, 1978. Requests for reprints should be sent to lohn te Linde, Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London. Ontario N6A 5C2, Canada.Copyright © 1979 Psychonomic Society, Inc. visual images. According to dual-coding theory (Paivio, 1975(Paivio, , 1978, two independent but interconnected systems exist in memory for retaining knowledge of the world. Perceptual information, such as the sizes of objects, is stored in a nonver...

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“…The evidence from the present experiments of the reversed direction of mapping between similarity and RT for the two types of response might also be taken as evidence for a dual-process theory. However, Krumhansl (1978) has recently shown how it may be possible to obtain this altered mapping by taking into account both the distance between and the density surrounding points in a multidimensional space (see, also, Hutchinson & Lockhead, 1977;Monahan & Lockhead, 1977). In effect, Krumhansl attempts to predict both "same" and "different" judgments from a representational medium based solely on psychological distance between nonidentical objects, and thus this model-although not intended as a process modelseems consistent with a single-process approach based on a concept of "discnrninability."…”

Section: Directionally Reversed Mappingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reaction time as a measure of inter- and intraobject visual similarity: Letters of the alphabet

Podgorny

Garner

1979

Perception & Psychophysics

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Interobject visual similarity is often measured by the time that subjects require to say that two objects are not identical, with long RTs indicating high similarity. In Experiment 1, using a complete set of uppercase alphabetic stimuli, we show: (1) RTs correlate strongly with direct ratings of visual similarity. (2) Stimuli that are similar as measured by RT or by direct judgment have the same profile of similarity to all other stimuli in the set as measured by correlational analysis. (3) The order in which the stimuli are compared has only a small effect on measured similarity. All of these results indicate desirable properties of any measure of similarity. Intraobject similarity is a concept pertinent to the relation of an object to itself. In Experiments 1 and 2 we show: (1) All letters are not equally similar to themselves, since RT for the "same" response is different for different letters. (2) The relation between RT and intraobject similarity is opposite to that for interobject similarity, with short RTs indicating high intraobject similarity. (3) Even though intraobject similarities differ, each letter is more similar to itself than to any other letter in the set. We discuss the implications of these results in terms of assumed proximity constraints underlying similarity data.

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Similarity as distance: A structural principle for semantic memory.

Cited by 56 publications

References 41 publications

Unities in inductive reasoning.

Unities in inductive reasoning.

Symbolic comparison of color similarity

Reaction time as a measure of inter- and intraobject visual similarity: Letters of the alphabet

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