The feature-matching approach pioneered by Amos Tversky remains a groundwork for psychological models of similarity and categorization but is rarely explicitly justified considering recent advances in thinking about cognition. While psychologists often view similarity as an unproblematic foundational concept that explains generalization and conceptual thought, long-standing philosophical problems challenging this assumption suggest that similarity derives from processes of higher-level cognition, including inference and conceptual thought. This paper addresses three specific challenges to Tversky’s approach: (i) the feature-selection problem, (ii) the problem (...) of cognitive implausibility, and (iii) the problem of unprincipled tweaking. It subsequently supports key insights from Tversky’s account based on recent developments in Bayesian modeling of cognition. A novel computational view of similarity as inference is proposed that addresses each challenge by considering the contrast class as constitutive of similarity and selecting for highly informative features. In so doing, this view illustrates the ongoing promise of the feature-matching approach in explaining perception, generalization and conceptual thought by grounding them in principles of probabilistic inference. (shrink)

Measuring perceived similarity is an important issue in visual perception of faces, since a measure of the perceived similarity between faces may be used to investigate fundamental tasks like face categorization and recognition. Despite its fundamental role, measuring perceived similarity between faces is not trivial from both a theoretical and methodological point of view. In this paper we present theoretical arguments that undermine the method currently most used to measure perceived similarity between faces in visual perception, and we propose an (...) alternative method. We finally compare the two methods and find some empirical evidence that the proposed method can provide a more reliable evaluation of the perceived similarity between faces. (shrink)