Learning a model of perceptual similarity from a collection of objects is a fundamental task in machine learning underlying numerous applications. A common way to learn such a model is from relative comparisons in the form of triplets: responses to queries of the form “Is object a more similar to b than it is to c?”. If no consideration is made in the determination of which queries to ask, exis...

Levels Observations are categorized to concepts with respect to some principles that depend on physical and=or functional characteristics of the items. From this perspective, Zentall et al. have categorized concepts to three levels of abstraction (Zentall et al. 2002) (see Figure 1): Perceptual: These concepts are formed solely by measuring similarity of instances in perceptual space. Such data...

The present study further investigates findings of impairment in Gestalt, but not global processing in ASD (Brosnan, Scott, Fox & Pye, 2004). Nineteen males with ASD and nineteen typically developing males matched by non-verbal ability, took part in five Gestalt perceptual grouping tasks. Results showed that performance differed according to grouping type. The ASD group showed typical performan...

The classical non-local means image denoising approach, the value of a pixel is determined based on the weighted average of other pixels, where the weights are determined based on a fixed isotropic ally weighted similarity function between the local neighbourhoods. It is demonstrate that noticeably improved perceptual quality can be achieved through the use of adaptive anisotropic ally weighted...

The perceptual loop theory of speech monitoring (Levelt, 1983) claims that inner and overt speech are monitored by the comprehension system, which detects errors by comparing the comprehension of formulated utterances to originally intended utterances. To test the perceptual loop monitor, speakers named pictures and sometimes attempted to halt speech in response to auditory (Experiments 1 and 3...

People often describe things that are similar as close and things that are dissimilar as far apart. Does the way people talk about similarity reveal something fundamental about the way they conceptualize it? Three experiments tested the relationship between similarity and spatial proximity that is encoded in metaphors in language. Similarity ratings for pairs of words or pictures varied as a fu...

A new theory of similarity, rooted in the detection and recognition literatures, is developed. The general recognition theory assumes that the perceptual effect of a stimulus is random but that on any single trial it can be represented as a point in a multidimensional space. Similarity is a function of the overlap of perceptual distributions. It is shown that the general recognition theory cont...