Simulating Time-Course Phenomena in Perceptual Similarity via Incremental Encoding

If people are required to respond very quickly in a samedifferent task, their judgments of sameness are heavily reliant on attribute matches, despite the fact that when given ample time, the judgments seem to rely chiefly on relational matches (Goldstone & Medin, 1994). One interpretation of this temporal pattern is that attribute matches enter into the comparison process before relational matches. However, an alternate explanation, suggested by findings of Sloutsky & Yarlas (submitted) is that attributes are encoded before relations. In this case, if the comparison process begins before the encoding is completed, early matches will involve attributes but not relations. We show via a simulation that SME can model the Goldstone & Medin results, as well as the Sloutsky & Yarlas (submitted).