Analyzing Behavioral Similarity Measures in Linguistic and Non-linguistic Conceptualization of Spatial Information and the Question of Individual Differences

Similarity measures are central to human cognition (Tversky, 1977) and have long been a central aspect for modeling spatial knowledge (Tobler, 1970). To determine the similarity of geographic entities, such as elements of the landscape, and geographic events, such as a tornado crossing a state, from a cognitive perspective several approaches have been proposed, specifically: geometric, feature-based, alignment based, and transformational In all disciplines participating in the endeavor of cognitive science, geometric approaches are used to model similarity and conceptual knowledge, by applying distance concepts such as network distance or Euclidean distance. Similarity is inversely proportional to distance: the smaller the distance between two entities, the more similar they are. Similarity has gained widespread interest in spatial sciences as a necessity for formally characterizing categorization (Schwering, 2008). However, behavioral studies on the similarity of spatio-temporal (geographic) events have not gained the same attention as formal treatments of similarity. Partially, this is due to the difficulties with perceived similarity that have long been an argument in psychology (for an overview see Goldstone, 1999). Establishing similarity is a prerequisite for conceptualization. Conceptualization has the goal to abstract from the rich, continuous, and overwhelming environmental data input into the human cognitive system to achieve a less detailed, coarser representation of spatio-temporal information. Clark termed this cognitive ability the 007 principle: " In general, evolved creatures will neither store nor process information in costly ways when they can use the structure of the environment and their operations upon it as a convenient stand-in for the information-processing operations concerned. That is, know only as much as you need to know to get the job done. " (Clark, A. 1989, p. 64) Given this brief background, our interest lies in the development of a research methodology that tries to reveal conceptualization processes by assessing behavioral similarity ratings. Furthermore, our interest lies in the relationship between the result of a conceptualization process, here called conceptual structure (Jackendoff, 1997), as an internal representation and, different externalizations, i.e. the use of different modalities to communicate conceptual structures. The focus in the latter case lies on linguistic and graphic representations.