Structural alignment facilitates the noticing of differences

Gentner, Dedre; Gunn, Virginia

doi:10.3758/bf03200458

Cited by 99 publications

(122 citation statements)

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“…Why does seeing the blue and yellow (and purple and orange) spoon side-by-side make more explicit the relation between color and function? Gentner and her colleagues (Gentner, 1983;Gentner & Gunn, 2001;Gentner & Markman, 1994;Gentner & Medina, 1998;Markman & Gentner, 1997 have argued that when attempting to map one event representation onto another, there are multiple strategies that can be invoked. One strategy is to focus on the objects themselves, and to identify whether the object in the first event (e.g., blue spoon) maps onto the object in the second event (e.g., yellow spoon).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In children, comparison has been identified as important to analogical reasoning (Gentner & Namy, 2006;Gentner & Toupin, 1986), detecting relational similarities (Kotovsky & Gentner, 1996), spatial mapping (Loewenstein & Gentner, 2001), and the development of categories (Gentner & Namy, 1999). Finally, cognitive psychologists have investigated the importance of comparison to a number of cognitive functions, including analogy, memory, representational mapping (Gentner, 1983;Gentner & Gunn, 2001;Markman & Gentner, 1997. Together these results firmly establish comparison as an integral part of cognitive function, across the life span.…”

Section: The Role Of Comparison In Forming Categorical Event Represenmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Why did the experience of mapping a novel adjective within (but not across) a basic level category enhance 3-year-olds' capacity to subsequently map a novel adjective across basic level categories? Klibanoff and Waxman (2000) suggested that seeing the target and test objects together provided infants with the opportunity to directly compare the objects and to identify ways in which the objects were the same and ways in which they were different (see Gentner & Gunn, 2001;Gentner & Markman, 1994;Gentner & Namy, 1999 for support for this proposal). When the target and test objects belonged to the same basic level category the objects were similar in many respects, making it easy for infants to identify relevant differences.…”

Section: The Role Of Comparison In Forming Categorical Event Represenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Color–function categories that prime infants to use color information in an object individuation task

Wilcox

Woods

Chapa

2008

Cognitive Psychology

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There is evidence for developmental hierarchies in the type of information to which infants attend when reasoning about objects. Investigators have questioned the origin of these hierarchies and how infants come to identify new sources of information when reasoning about objects. The goal of the present experiments was to shed light on this debate by identifying conditions under which infants' sensitivity to color information, which is slow to emerge, could be enhanced in an object individuation task. The outcome of Experiment 1 confirmed and extended previous reports that 9.5-month-olds can be primed, through exposure to events in which the color of an object predicts its function, to attend to color differences in a subsequent individuation task. The outcomes of Experiments 2 to 4 revealed age-related changes in the nature of the representations that support color priming. This is exemplified by three main findings. First, the representations that are formed during the colorfunction events are relatively specific. That is, infants are primed to use the color difference seen in the color-function events to individuate objects in the test events, but not other color differences. Second, 9.5-month-olds can be led to form more abstract event representations, and then generalize to other colors in the test events if they are shown multiple pairs of colors in the color-function events. Third, slightly younger 9-month-olds also can be led to form more inclusive categories with multiple color pairs, but only when they are allowed to directly compare the exemplars in each color pair during the present events. These results shed light on the development of categorization abilities, cognitive mechanisms that support color-function priming, and the kinds of experiences that can increase infants' sensitivity to color information.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Role Of Comparison In Forming Categorical Event Represenmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: The Role Of Comparison In Forming Categorical Event Represenmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Color–function categories that prime infants to use color information in an object individuation task

Wilcox

Woods

Chapa

2008

Cognitive Psychology

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“…Structural alignment accounts for the relations between the features of a single stimulus, but it often underestimates perceived similarity because it fails to account for the relation between two stimuli. In fact, Gentner and Brem (1999; see also Gentner & Gunn, 2001) reject thematic relations as a legitimate source of similarity. In their view, similarity is synonymous with comparison (i.e., structural alignment); therefore, any other process that influences a similarity task (e.g., thematic integration) is considered illegitimate.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gentner and Gunn (2001) presented pairs of concepts and instructed participants to list either thematic relations between the items or commonalities. They found that the two tasks had different effects on the subsequent processing of those stimuli: Whereas listing thematic relations inhibited the detection of differences between concepts, listing commonalities facilitated the detection of differences.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences in the perception of similarity and difference

Simmons

Estes

2008

Cognition

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Thematically related concepts like coffee & milk are judged to be more similar than thematically unrelated concepts like coffee & lemonade. We investigated whether thematic relations exert a small effect that occurs consistently across participants (i.e., a generalized model), or a large effect that occurs inconsistently across participants (i.e., an individualized model). We also examined whether difference judgments mirrored similarity or whether these judgments were, in fact, non-inverse. Five studies demonstrated the necessity of an individualized model for both perceived similarity and difference, and additionally provided evidence that thematic relations affect similarity more than difference. Results suggest that models of similarity and difference must be attuned to large and consistent individual variability in the weighting of thematic relations.KEYWORDS: dual process model; individual differences; non-inversion; perceived difference; perceived similarity; thematic relations. DISAGREEMENT IN SIMILARITY 3Similarity and difference are fundamental to cognition. They determine, in large part, the recognition of familiar objects and the categorization of novel objects, and they drive inferences about an object's features and its predicted behavior in a novel context. Essentially, similarity and difference have been implicated in nearly every cognitive process from perceptual classification to economic decision-making. Given that similarity and difference influence so many other cognitive processes, then, it is crucial to determine what factors influence the perceptions of similarity and difference themselves.Some potentially important factors remain underspecified in contemporary models of similarity and difference. For example, perceived similarity and difference may exhibit large individual differences (Simmons & Estes, 2008), but current models fail to account for this presumed variability. Moreover, the relationship between similarity and difference appears to be surprisingly complex (Medin, Goldstone, and Gentner, 1990), and current models do not adequately explain this relationship. Below we report five studies that investigate directly these currently unresolved issues. We first review the major models of semantic similarity, with particular emphasis on the dual process model (Bassok & Medin, 1997;Estes, 2003;Simmons & Estes, 2008;Wisniewski & Bassok, 1999), and then we summarize the literature on the relationship between similarity and difference. Models of SimilarityIn general, similarity can be described in terms of three types of information: features, structural relations, and thematic relations. Of these, features make the most intuitive contribution -the more features that two things have in common, the more similar they are.This intuition is formalized in the contrast model (Tversky, 1977) The structural alignment model (Gentner & A. B. Markman, 1994 A. B. Markman, 1996;A. B. Markman & Gentner, 1993a, 1993b) provides a solution to this problem. According to this model, one's concept...

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Different and similar at the same time: when the activation of dissimilarity makes people look more similar

Ruys

Spears

Gordijn

2007

Euro J Social Psych

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Whether two people are presented as similar or different may have a strong impact on the outcome of their comparison. In the present research, we examined the counterintuitive hypothesis that activating dissimilarity increases the perception of similarities between people, in other words increases perceived feature overlap, during the comparison process. We investigated this prediction by asking people to judge the perceived similarity between two faces with a suboptimally related or unrelated morph inserted in between (to influence joint categorization), and with similar or different facial expressions (to vary the salience of similar or different features). The results confirmed our expectations: In the similarity (joint categorization) condition, two faces that differed in expression were perceived as more dissimilar than faces with the same expression. More important for our prediction, in the dissimilarity condition two faces with different expressions were no longer perceived as more dissimilar than two faces with the same expression. We discuss implications of these findings for the mechanisms underlying comparisons between people.

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Structural alignment facilitates the noticing of differences

Cited by 99 publications

References 32 publications

Color–function categories that prime infants to use color information in an object individuation task

Color–function categories that prime infants to use color information in an object individuation task

Individual differences in the perception of similarity and difference

Different and similar at the same time: when the activation of dissimilarity makes people look more similar

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