Determining transformation distance in similarity: Considerations for assessing representational changes a priori.

The Representational Distortion (RD) approach to similarity (e.g., Hahn, Chater, & Richardson, 2003) proposes that similarity is computed using the transformation distance between two entities.

Assessing the concreteness of relational representation.

Research has shown that people's ability to transfer abstract relational knowledge across situations can be heavily influenced by the concrete objects that fill relational roles. This article provides evidence that the concreteness of the relations themselves also affects performance. In 3 experiments, participants viewed simple relational patterns of visual objects and then identified these same patterns under a variety of physical transformations.

What is typical about the typicality effect in category-based induction?

Research on category-based induction has documented a consistent typicality effect: Typical exemplars promote stronger inferences about their broader category than atypical exemplars. This work has been largely confined to categories whose central tendencies are also the most typical members of the category. Does the typicality effect apply to the broad set of categories for which the ideal category member is considered most typical? In experiments with natural and artificial categories, typicality and induction-strength ratings were obtained for ideal and central-tendency exemplars.

The optimal level of fuzz: Case studies in a methodology for psychological research.

Cognitive Science research is hard to conduct, because researchers must take phenomena from the world and turn them into laboratory tasks for which a reasonable level of experimental control can be achieved. Consequently, research necessarily makes tradeoffs between internal validity (experimental control) and external validity (the degree to which a task represents behavior outside of the lab). Researchers are thus seeking the best possible tradeoff between these constraints, which we refer to as the optimal level of fuzz.