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Inducing Metric Violations in Human Similarity Judgements

2007

Conference Paper

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Attempting to model human categorization and similarity judgements is both a very interesting but also an exceedingly difficult challenge. Some of the difficulty arises because of conflicting evidence whether human categorization and similarity judgements should or should not be modelled as to operate on a mental representation that is essentially metric. Intuitively, this has a strong appeal as it would allow (dis)similarity to be represented geometrically as distance in some internal space. Here we show how a single stimulus, carefully constructed in a psychophysical experiment, introduces l2 violations in what used to be an internal similarity space that could be adequately modelled as Euclidean. We term this one influential data point a conflictual judgement. We present an algorithm of how to analyse such data and how to identify the crucial point. Thus there may not be a strict dichotomy between either a metric or a non-metric internal space but rather degrees to which potentially large subsets of stimuli are represented metrically with a small subset causing a global violation of metricity.

Author(s): Laub, J. and Macke, JH. and Müller, K-R. and Wichmann, FA.
Book Title: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19
Journal: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference
Pages: 777-784
Year: 2007
Month: September
Day: 0
Editors: Sch{\"o}lkopf, B. , J. Platt, T. Hofmann
Publisher: MIT Press

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

Event Name: Twentieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2006)
Event Place: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Address: Cambridge, MA, USA
Digital: 0
ISBN: 0-262-19568-2
Language: en
Organization: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
School: Biologische Kybernetik

Links: PDF
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BibTex

@inproceedings{4266,
  title = {Inducing Metric Violations in Human Similarity Judgements},
  author = {Laub, J. and Macke, JH. and M{\"u}ller, K-R. and Wichmann, FA.},
  journal = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19},
  pages = {777-784},
  editors = {Sch{\"o}lkopf, B. , J. Platt, T. Hofmann},
  publisher = {MIT Press},
  organization = {Max-Planck-Gesellschaft},
  school = {Biologische Kybernetik},
  address = {Cambridge, MA, USA},
  month = sep,
  year = {2007},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {9}
}