Similarity judgments of same-category object representations: Effects of physical size, manipulability, and word frequency

ABSTRACT

Studies of object similarity have focused on the relationship between different physical objects and their mental representations or between instances of the same physical object and its mental representation. The present study is the first to investigate the structure of within-category psychological space. We provided evidence that large objects and frequently mentioned objects are perceived as less similar to each other compared to small objects or less frequently mentioned objects. Further, similarity judgments were higher for manipulable objects compared to non-manipulable objects. The relevance of these data to the isomorphism between physical and psychological spaces is also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Similarity
• category representation
• manipulability
• isomorphy of psychological and physical space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by a Marie Curie FP7-PEOPLE-IAPP [grant number 610986].