Many previous studies have examined the ease with which two spatially adjacent textures can be segmented. Our goal is to examine the representational system that determines the appearance of isolated patches of visual texture. To this end, similarity judgments from three subjects were obtained for 20 artificial textures comprising filtered noise. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) revealed that thr...

Accounts of induction development suggest that young children’s inferences are based either on object kind knowledge (Gelman & Markman, 1986), or on perceptual similarity (e.g., Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004). However, both accounts suggest that inferences with familiar and newly-learned categories engage a common set of psychological processes (determination of object kind or perceptual similarity)....

This article examines the development of inductive generalization, and presents a model of young children's induction and two experiments testing the model. The model specifies contribution of linguistic labels and perceptual similarity to young children's induction and predicts a correspondence between similarity judgment and induction of young children. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds, 7- ...

There is evidence for both advantages and disadvantages in normal recognition of living over non-living things. This paradox has been attributed to high levels of perceptual similarity within living categories having a different effect on performance in different contexts. However, since living things are intrinsically more similar to each other, previous studies could not determine whether the...