The present study provides an empirical evaluation of the ideal representation view of concept representation. We compared the ideal representation view with the more established exemplar and prototype views both in common taxonomic categories and in ad hoc categories. All three views are modeled based on underlying spatial similarity representations. Results suggest that the ideal representati...

Many real world situations do not offer unambiguous outcome feedback on how to categorize objects. Models in the categorization literature have mostly been formulated for tasks with trial-by-trial outcome feedback. We examined if there was evidence for exemplar memory also when no external feedback is provided and the criterion is derivative of more abstract knowledge. In a “teacher-student” ta...

In this study, we investigated to what extent exemplar-based and prototype predictors can be applied to predicting categorization in natural language concepts. Participants categorized novel tropical foods into two well-known natural language concepts: fruits and vegetables. The results indicate that both the prototype predictors and the exemplar predictors contribute significantly in accountin...

In this paper we define a new similarity measure, the nonbreaking similarity, which is the complement of the famous breakpoint distance between genomes (in general, between any two sequences drawn from the same alphabet). When the two input genomes G and H, drawn from the same set of n gene families, contain gene repetitions, we consider the corresponding Exemplar Non-breaking Similarity proble...

Kuhl’s native language magnet (NLM) theory of phonetic learning is examined in the light of an exemplar-based model. According to the NLM theory the perceptual space is partitioned into phonetic categories as a consequence of the magnet-like properties of the category’s best exemplar  the category’s prototype. The NLM theory predicts that the perceptual space is warped in the neighborhood of t...

Much attention has been given to increasing women’s and girls’ interest and participation in STEM fields. One way of increasing STEM interest is to target STEM-gender stereotypes by presenting students with female stereotypedisconfirming exemplars. However, the exemplar approach has had mixed effectiveness in adolescent populations. The present study examined middle school students’ interest in...