Comparison supports the development of children’s analogical reasoning. The evidence for this claim comes from laboratory studies. We describe spontaneous comparisons produced by 24 typically developing children from 26 to 58 months. Children tend to express similarity before expressing difference. They compare objects from the same category before objects from different categories, make global...

Texture is an important visual feature for computer vision tasks. In applications such as image retrieval and computer image understanding, texture similarity should be measured in a manner that is invariant to texture scale and orientation, as well as consistent with human’s perception. However, most existing computational features and similarity measures are not perceptually consistent. A sol...

Two experiments examined event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral correlates of categorizing stimuli varying in perceptual similarity to targets. Participants performed a target-detection task in which non-target stimuli varied in target similarity but occurred with equivalent probability. The stimuli were variations of a schematic human face comprised of eight distinct features: two eyes...

The dynamics of spoken word recognition are acutely sensitive to competition among similar-sounding words. Here, we take advantage of this sensitivity to examine the manner in which native Italian speakers who are late learners of English perceive English vowels. Native Italian speakers and native English speakers listened to recordings of naturally produced words (”pin,” ”pen,” and ”pan”) and ...

Similarity-based generalization is fundamental to human cognition, and the ability to draw analogies based on relational similarities between superficially different domains is crucial for reasoning and inference. Learning to base generalization on shared relations rather than (or in the face of) shared perceptual features has been identified as an important developmental milestone. However, re...