To succeed in STEM, students need to learn to use visual representations. Most prior research has focused on conceptual knowledge about visual representations that is acquired via verbally mediated forms of learning. However, students also need perceptual fluency: the ability to rapidly and effortlessly translate among representations. Perceptual fluency is acquired via nonverbal, implicit lear...

The term perceptual grouping is associated with classical principles such as similarity and proximity. This article reports induced perceptual grouping, a phenomenon that occurs when placement of a uniform set of items near a structured set induces grouping within the otherwise uniform set. For example, when items grouped pair-wise by similarity are placed near another set of unstructured items...

Linguistic experience has been shown to affect the perception of regional dialect variation. This pilot study examined the effect of familiarity on the perceived similarity of regional dialects. Native speakers of American English completed a paired comparison perceptual similarity rating task with a group of unfamiliar regional dialects. Speakers of American English were asked to make explicit...

People categorized pairs of perceptual stimuli that varied in both category membership and pairwise similarity. Experiments 1 and 2 showed categorization of 1 color of a pair to be reliably contrasted from that of the other. This similarity-based contrast effect occurred only when the context stimulus was relevant for the categorization of the target (Experiment 3). The effect was not simply ow...

This paper describes a perceptual distance measure for phase spectrum based on results from a subjective experiment using stimuli. The stimuli have flat amplitude spectrum and, in a particular frequency band, have a certain group delay value. The experiment was performed using stimuli with different group delay peak values where the group delay center frequencies are fixed, and their associated...

An important problem in accessing and retrieving visual information is to provide efficient similarity matching in large databases. Though much work is being done on the investigation of suitable perceptual models and the automatic extraction of features, little attention is given to the combination of useful representations and similarity models with efficient index structures. In this paper w...

In cross-language speech perception studies, the perceptual categories of a listener group are often assumed to be adequately represented by single, abstract labels, such as the position-dependent allophonic variant of a phoneme. However, listeners of different languages may also vary in their perceptual weighting of acoustic cues that signal a given phoneme, or its allophonic realization, in t...

We aim to develop a better understanding of perception of similarity in focal computed tomography (CT) liver images to determine the feasibility of techniques for developing reference sets for training and validating content-based image retrieval systems. In an observer study, four radiologists and six nonradiologists assessed overall similarity and similarity in 5 image features in 136 pairs o...

In audio based music similarity, a well known effect is the existence of hubs, i.e. songs which appear similar to many other songs without showing any meaningful perceptual similarity. We verify that this effect also exists in very large databases (> 250000 songs) and that it even gets worse with growing size of databases. By combining different aspects of audio similarity we are able to reduce...

The present neuroimaging study examines how repetition-related neural attenuation effects differ as a function of the perceptual similarity of the repetition and subsequent memory. One previous study (Turk-Browne et al., 2006) reported greater attenuation effects for subsequent hits than for misses. Another study (Wagner et al., 2000) found that neural attenuation is negatively correlated with ...