The Treachery of Images: Objects, Pictures, Words and the Role of Affordances in Similarity Judgements

Abstract

Categorization is a fundamental cognitive strategy employed to ease information processing and to aid memory formation. Past research on how humans categorize objects has used images of objects as experimental stimuli. Results suggest these stimuli are categorized based on abstract linguistic concepts. Concurrently, studies in the past 10 years have found differences in the processing of images as compared to real-world objects. One proposed explanation is that these results are due to differences in the affordances of images versus objects. Using a similarity judgement paradigm, we have explored the effect of affordances in a categorization task including words (object names), images, and objects. Consistent with previous research, we found significant differences in how participants made similarity judgements of images and objects. Moreover, we found that similarity judgments using object names were much more similar to the judgments of pictures than of objects. An exploratory cluster analysis opens the possibility of framing such differences as affordance driven. These results suggest a need for more ecologically valid categorization tasks, more conservative inferences when using images as stimuli in these tasks, and the need for further exploring the role of affordances in categorization.

A Proposed Framework for Identity Verification in Passport Management Using Model Scaling and Semantic Similarity

“…The cosine of the angle between two vectors obtained from images projected in a multi-dimensional space is measured [28]. In this context, the two vectors which are being referenced are obtained using the feature extractor class which outputs the features of two images in vectorized form [29].…”