It has recently been suggested that knowledge is represented in the form of perceptual symbol systems (Barsalou, 1999). According to this view, perceptual states may be used to support higher cognitive processes without being transduced into a representational language. Since the ability to recognize difference and similarity is fundamental for cognition, we examined to what extent it might be ...

Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) posits that the metaphorical ways in which we talk about abstract concepts are indicative of the ways in which we think about those concepts. In a recent test of this hypothesis, Casasanto (2007) considered the metaphor SIMILARITY IS PROXIMITY. He found evidence to suggest that the effect of physical proximity on similarity ratings differs dep...

In line with previous work by Treisman, many studies have demonstrated effects of perceptual discrimination between visual targets and distractors. Few studies however have investigated semantic discrimination effects. We report the findings of two experiments that were carried out in order to demonstrate the influence of semantic relatedness between a target word and distractor words in intera...

Lin and Murphy (1997) have studied how adults learn to associate a new theory about an object with specific perceptual features of the object. In the present experiment, their paradigm was adapted for threeand four-year olds who were compared with adults. The role of perceptual similarity between the learning stimulus and transfer stimuli was also assessed. Data show that children aged three we...

One account of the early versus late selection debate in attention proposes that perceptual load determines the locus of selection. Attention selects stimuli at a late processing level under low-load conditions but selects stimuli at an early level under high-load conditions. Despite the successes of perceptual load theory, a noncircular definition of perceptual load remains elusive. We investi...

Perceptual consistency is important in many computer vision applications. Unfortunately, except for color, computational features and similarity measurements for other visual features are not necessarily consistent with human's perception. This paper addresses three critical issues regarding perceptually consistent texture analysis: (1) development of perceptual texture space, (2) assessment of...