The Role of Familiarity, Priming and Perception in Similarity Judgments
Laura M. Hiatt, J. Gregory Trafton · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2013
We present a novel way of accounting for similarity judgments. Our approach posits that similarity ratings stem from three main sources: familiarity, priming, and inherent perceptual similarity. We present a process model of our approach in the cognitive architecture ACT-R, and match our model’s predic-tions to data collected from a human subject experiment which involved simple perceptual stimuli. Familiarity accounts for rising ratings over time; priming accounts for asymmetric ef-fects that arise when the stimuli are shown with different fre-quencies. Pure perceptual similarity also predicts trends in the results. Overall, our model matched the data with R2 of 0.99.