Sun Hong-Mei, Yin Guo-En
School of Management, Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tianjin, China.
Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China.
Cogn Process. 2020 Feb;21(1):23-32. doi: 10.1007/s10339-019-00931-0. Epub 2019 Sep 13.
The similarity of the features between two entities has been assumed to be the essential factor for distinguishing these two entities across a variety of cognitive acts; however, the mechanism underlying the similarity processing remains unclear. The perceptual-based account suggests that similarity judgment is based on perceptual features between entities, whereas other accounts assume that similarity judgment relies heavily on one's previous knowledge of the entities. In Experiment 1, we explored the influence of theoretical knowledge on similarity judgment when perceptual features conflict with conceptual information. In Experiment 2, we examined whether categorization tasks further influence the results of the similarity judgment. Our results showed that the theoretical knowledge contributed to the overall similarity of the stimuli. In addition, carrying out a categorization task or not did not contribute more to the processes of the similarity judgment. Overall, these findings suggest that the conceptual information is more important than perceptual features while judging the similarity of two entities; if sufficient theoretical knowledge is available, the criteria for carrying out the categorization task might be consistent with those for the similarity judgment in the present study.
在各种认知行为中，两个实体之间特征的相似性被认为是区分这两个实体的关键因素；然而，相似性处理背后的机制仍不清楚。基于感知的观点认为，相似性判断基于实体之间的感知特征，而其他观点则认为相似性判断严重依赖于个体对实体的先验知识。在实验1中，当感知特征与概念信息冲突时，我们探究了理论知识对相似性判断的影响。在实验2中，我们检验了分类任务是否会进一步影响相似性判断的结果。我们的结果表明，理论知识对刺激的整体相似性有贡献。此外，是否执行分类任务对相似性判断过程并没有更大的影响。总体而言，这些发现表明，在判断两个实体的相似性时，概念信息比感知特征更重要；如果有足够的理论知识，执行分类任务的标准可能与本研究中相似性判断的标准一致。
