Goldstone, R. L., Feng, Y., & Rogosky, B. (2005).  Connecting concepts to the world and each other. In D. Pecher & R. Zwaan (Eds.)  Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp. 292-314)

Goldstone, R. L., & Son, J. Y. (2005).  The transfer of scientific principles using concrete and idealized simulations.  The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14, 69-110.

Participants in two experiments interacted with computer simulations designed to foster understanding of scientific principles governing complex adaptive systems.  The quality of participants’ transportable understanding was measured by the amount of transfer between two simulations governed by the same principle.  The perceptual concreteness of the elements within the first simulation was manipulated.  The elements either remained concrete throughout the simulation, remained idealized, or switched midway into the simulation from concrete to idealized or vice versa.  Transfer was better when the appearance of the elements switched, consistent with theories predicting more general schemas when the schemas are multiply instantiated.  The best transfer was observed when originally concrete elements became idealized.  These results are interpreted in terms of tradeoffs between grounded, concrete construals of simulations and more abstract, transportable construals.  Progressive idealization (“Concreteness fading”) allows originally grounded and interpretable principles to become less tied to specific contexts and hence more transferable.
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Goldstone, R. L, & Son, J. (2005).  Similarity.  In K. Holyoak & R. Morrison (Eds.).  Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp. 13-36).

Goldstone, R. L., Ashpole, B. C., & Roberts, M. E., (2005). Knowledge of resources and competitors in human foraging.  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12, 81-87.

Goldstone, R. L., & Johansen, M. K. (2003). Conceptual development from origins to asymptotes.  In D. Rakison & L. Oakes (Eds.) Categories and concepts in early development.  (pp. 403-418).  Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Goldstone, R. L., & Kersten, A. (2003). Concepts and Categories. In A. F. Healy & R. W. Proctor (Eds.) Comprehensive handbook of psychology, Volume 4: Experimental psychology.  (pp. 591-621).  New York: Wiley.

Issues related to concepts and categorization are nearly ubiquitous in psychology because of peoples natural tendency to perceive a thing AS something.  Zen meditation practices may or may not succeed in allowing a person to grasp the object itself rather than the labels and associations it evokes.  In either case, the difficulty of this pursuit affirms the powerful impulse that we have to interpret our world.  This act of interpretation, an act of seeing something as X rather than simply seeing it (Wittgenstein, 1953), is fundamentally an act of categorization.

The attraction of research on concepts is that an extremely wide variety of cognitive acts can be understood as categorizations.  Identifying the person sitting across from you at the breakfast table involves categorizing something as your spouse.  Diagnosing the cause of someones illness involves a disease categorization.  Interpreting a painting as a Picasso, an artifact as Mayan, a geometry as Non-Euclidean, a fugue as baroque, a conversationalist as charming, a wine as a Bordeaux, and a government as socialist are categorizations at various levels of abstraction.  The typically unspoken assumption of research on concepts is that these cognitive acts have something in common.  That is, there are principles that explain many or all acts of categorization.  This assumption is controversial (see Medin, Lynch, & Solomon, 2000), but is perhaps justified by its potential pay-off.  If there are common principles governing concepts in their diverse manifestations, then discovering these principles would have a tremendous benefit, for we would not only acquire an understanding of how people identify faces, recognize letters, treat diseases, or form categories in a specialized domain.  We would also have a unified understanding of all of these phenomena as examples of a generic process of concept formation.
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Shyi, G. S. -W., Goldstone, R. L., Hummel, J. E., & Lin, C. (submitted). Computing representations for bound and unbound object matching.

Five experiments examined the nature of object representation. Participants made same-different judgments between two multipart 3-D objects, according to rules where either the object parts and their spatial relationship had to be considered (role-relevant, RR) or just the object parts (role-irrelevant, RI). Results indicate that it was easiest to judge two identical and orientationally aligned objects according to either rule, followed by judging those that shared identical parts located in different positions according to the RI rule. It was most difficult to judge the latter according to the RR rule when they were misaligned by rotation. These findings lend support to the hypothesis that object representations at the image level, part level, or full structural description level may be computed and used for making same-different judgements. The implications of our findings for object recognition in general and the role of spatial attention in particular are discussed.
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Goldstone, R. L., & Rogosky, B. J. (2002). Using relations within conceptual systems to translate across conceptual systems, Cognition, 84, 295-320.

We explore one aspect of meaning, the identification of matching concepts across systems (e.g. people, theories, or cultures).  We present a computational algorithm called ABSURDIST (Aligning Between Systems Using Relations Derived Inside Systems for Translation) that uses only within-system similarity relations to find between-system translations.  While illustrating the sufficiency of within-system relations to account for translating between systems, simulations of ABSURDIST also indicate synergistic interactions between intrinsic, within-system information and extrinsic information.
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Here is a brief description and commentary on ABSURDIST:
Dietrich, E. (2003).  An ABSURDIST model vindicates a venerable theory.  Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 57-59.
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Goldstone, R. L., & Rogosky, B. J. (2002). The role of roles in translating across conceptual systems, Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.  Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  (pp. 369-374).

According to an “external grounding” theory of meaning, a concept’s meaning depends on its connection to the external world.  By a “conceptual web” account, a concept’s meaning depends on its relations to other concepts within the same system.  We explore one aspect of meaning, the identification of matching concepts across systems (e.g. people, theories, or cultures).  We present a computational algorithm called ABSURDIST (Aligning Between Systems Using Relations Derived Inside Systems for Translation) that uses only within-system similarity relations to find between-system translations.  While illustrating the sufficiency of a conceptual web account for translating between systems, simulations of ABSURDIST also indicate powerful synergistic interactions between intrinsic, within-system information and extrinsic information.  Applications of the algorithm to issues in object recognition, shape analysis, automatic translation, human analogy and comparison making, pattern matching, neural network interpretation, and statistical analysis are described.
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Goldstone, R. L, Lippa, Y., & Shiffrin, R. M. (2001). Altering object representations through category learning.  Cognition, 78, 27-43.

Previous research has shown that objects that are grouped together in the same category become more similar to each other and that objects that are grouped in different categories become increasingly dissimilar, as measured by similarity ratings and psychophysical discriminations. These findings are consistent with two theories of the influence of concept learning on similarity. By a strategic judgment bias account, the categories associated with objects are explicitly used as cues for determining similarity, and objects that are categorized together are judged to be more similar because similarity is not only a function of the objects themselves, but also the objectsí category labels. By a representational change account, category learning alters the description of the objects themselves, emphasizing properties that are relevant for categorization. A new method for distinguishing between these accounts is introduced which measures the difference between the similarity ratings of categorized objects to a neutral object. The results indicate both strategic biases based on category labels and genuine representational change, with the strategic bias affecting mostly objects belonging to different categories and the representational change affecting mostly objects belonging to the same category.
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Goldstone, R. L, & Steyvers, M. (2001). The Sensitization and Differentiation of Dimensions During Category Learning.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130,116-139.

The reported experiments explore two mechanisms by which object descriptions are flexibly adapted to support concept learning: selective attention and dimension differentiation. Arbitrary dimensions were created by blending photographs of faces in different proportions, and mixing these blends together.  Consistent with learned selective attention, positive transfer was found when initial and final categorizations shared either relevant or irrelevant dimensions, and negative transfer was found when previously relevant dimensions became irrelevant. Unexpectedly good transfer was observed when both irrelevant dimensions became relevant and relevant dimensions became irrelevant, and was explained in terms of participants learning to isolate one dimension from another. This account was further supported by experiments indicating that conditions expected to produce positive transfer via dimension differentiation produced better transfer than conditions expected to produce positive transfer via selective attention, but only when stimuli were composed of highly integral and overlapping dimensions. We discuss the relation between dimension differentiation and selective attention, mechanisms that may underlie these processes, and implications for category learning research.
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Lippa, Y., & Goldstone, R. L. (2001).  The Acquisition of Automatic Response Biases through Stimulus-Response Mapping and Categorization Determined by a Compatibility Task.  Memory & Cognition,  29, 1051-1060

Experiments explored whether spatially neutral stimuli acquire the ability to automatically elicit spatial responses. In Experiment 1, participants associated line-drawings with either left or right key presses. Subsequently, the pictures were used in a Simon task wherein participants made left and right key presses based on the color of the picture, ignoring its shape. Participants responded more quickly when the key press previously associated with the picture matched, rather than mismatched, the response required by the picture's color. In Experiment 2, participants learned response categories that grouped spatially ambiguous line-drawings together with pictures of left- and right-pointing arrows and fingers. A subsequent Simon task again yielded compatibility effects, indicating that the spatially ambiguous pictures inherited the response biases of the other objects in their category. Thus, responses directly associated with shapes, and indirectly associated with shapes by category membership, are both automatically triggered even when the responses are irrelevant and inappropriate.
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Goldstone, R. L. (2000). Unitization during Category Learning.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 26, 86-112

Five experiments explored the question of whether new perceptual units can be developed if they are diagnostic for a category learning task, and if so, what are the constraints on this unitization process? During category learning, participants were required to attend either a single component or a conjunction of five components in order to correctly categorize an object. In Experiments 1-4, some evidence for unitization was found in that the conjunctive task becomes much easier with practice, and this improvement was not found for the single component task, or for conjunctive tasks where the components cannot be unitized. Influences of component order (Experiment 1), component contiguity (Experiment 2), component proximity (Experiment 3), and number of components (Experiment 4) on practice effects were found. Using a Fourier Transformation method for deconvolving response times (Experiment 5), prolonged practice effects yielded responses that were faster than expected by analytic model that integrate evidence from independently perceived components.
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Goldstone, R. L. (2000). A neural network model  of concept-influenced segmentation.  Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.  Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 172-177).

Several models of categorization assume that fixed perceptual representations are combined together to determine categorizations.  This research explores the possibility that categorization experience alters, rather than simply uses, descriptions of objects.  Based on results from human experiments, a  model is presented in which a competitive learning network is first given categorization training, and then is given a subsequent segmentation task, using the same network weights.  Category learning establishes detectors for stimulus parts that are diagnostic, and these detectors, once established, bias the interpretation of subsequent objects to be segmented.
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Goldstone, R. L., Steyvers, M., Spencer-Smith, J., & Kersten, A. (2000). Interactions between perceptual and conceptual learning. in E. Diettrich & A. B.  Markman (eds.) Cognitive Dynamics: Conceptual Change in Humans and Machines.  Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  (pp. 191-228).

Confusions arise when 'stable' is equated with 'foundational.' Spurred on by the image of a house`s foundation, it is tempting to think that something provides effective support to the extent that it is rigid and stable. We will argue that when considering the role of perception in grounding our concepts, exactly the opposite is true. Our perceptual system supports our ability to acquire new concepts by being flexibly tuned to these concepts. Whereas the concepts that we learn are certainly influenced by our perceptual representations, we will argue that these perceptual representations are also influenced by the learned concepts. In keeping with one of the central themes of this book, behavioral adaptability is completely consistent with representationalism. In fact, the most straightforward account of our experimental results is that concept learning can produce changes in perceptual representations, the 'vocabulary' of perceptual features, that are used by subsequent tasks.

This chapter reviews theoretical and empirical evidence that perceptual vocabularies used to describe visual objects are flexibly adapted to the demands of their user. We will extend arguments made elsewhere for adaptive perceptual representations (Goldstone, Schyns, & Medin, in press; Schyns, Goldstone, & Thibaut, in press), and discuss research from our laboratory illustrating specific interactions between perceptual and conceptual learning. We will describe computer simulations that provide accounts of these interactions using neural network models. These models have detectors that become increasingly tuned to the set of perceptual features that support concept learning. The bulk of the chapter will be organized around mechanisms of human perceptual learning, and computer simulations of these mechanisms.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1999). Similarity. in R.A. Wilson & F. C. Keil (eds.) MIT encylopedia of the cognitive sciences.(pp. 763-765).Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

An ability to assess similarity lies close to the core of cognition. In the time-honored tradition of legitimizing fields of psychology by citing William James, `This sense of Sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking` (James, 1890/1950; p. 459). Similarity plays an indispensable foundational role in theories of cognition. People`s success in problem solving depends on the similarity of previously solved problems to current problems. Categorization depends on the similarity of objects to be categorized to category members. Memory retrieval depends on the similarity of retrieval cues to stored memories. Inductive reasoning is based on the principle that if an event is similar to a previous event, then similar outcomes are predicted. An understanding of these cognitive processes requires that we understand how humans assess similarity. Four major psychological models of similarity are: geometric, featural, alignment-based, and transformational.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1998). Perceptual Learning.  Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 585-612.

Perceptual learning involves relatively long-lasting changes to an organism`s perceptual system that improve its ability to respond to its environment. Four mechanisms of perceptual learning are discussed: attention weighting, imprinting, differentiation, and unitization. By attention weighting, perception becomes adapted to tasks and environments by increasing the attention paid to important dimensions and features. By imprinting, receptors are developed that are specialized for stimuli or parts of a stimuli. By differentiation, stimuli that were once indistinguishable become psychologically separated. By unitization, tasks that originally required detection of several parts come to be accomplished by detecting a single constructed unit representing a complex configuration. Research from cognitive psychology, psychophysics, neuroscience, expert/novice differences, development, computer science, and cross-cultural differences is described that relates to these mechanisms. The locus, limits, and applications of perceptual learning are also discussed.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1998). Hanging Together: A connectionist model of similarity. In J. Grainger & A. M. Jacobs (Eds.)  Localist Connectionist Approaches to Human Cognition.  (pp. 283 - 325).  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Human judgments of similarity have traditionally been modelled by measuring the distance between the compared items in a psychological space, or the overlap between the items` featural representations. An alternative approach, inspired jointly by work in analogical reasoning (D. Gentner, 1983; K. T. Holyoak & P. Thagard, 1989) and interactive activation models of perception (J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart, 1981), views the process of judging similarity as one of establishing alignments between the parts of compared entities. A localist connectionist model of similarity, SIAM, is described wherein units represent correspondences between scene parts, and these units mutually and concurrently influence each other according to their compatability. The model is primarily applied to similarity rating tasks, but is also applied to other indirect measures of similarity, to judgments of alignment between scene parts, to impressions of comparison difficulty, and to patterns of perceptual sensitivity for matching and mismatching features.
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Kersten, A. W., Goldstone, R. L., & Schaffert, A.(1998). Two Competing Attentional Mechanisms in Category Learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 1437-1458.

This research provides evidence for two competing attentional mechanisms. Attentional persistence directs attention to attributes previously found to be predictive, whereas contrast directs attention to stimuli that have not already been associated with a category. Three experiments provide evidence for these mechanisms. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed increased attention to an attribute following training in which that attribute was relevant, providing evidence for persistence. These experiments also revealed increased attention to an attribute following training in which another, more salient attribute was relevant, providing evidence for contrast. Experiment 3 used a subtractive method to determine the contributions of persistence and contrast to changes in attention to an attribute. The results suggest that persistence operates primarily at the level of dimensions, whereas contrast operates at the level of dimension values.
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Schyns, P. G., Goldstone, R. L., & Thibaut, J-P (1998). Development of features in object concepts.  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 1-54.

According to an influential approach to cognition, our perceptual systems provide us with a repertoire of fixed features as input to higher-level cognitive processes. We present a theory of category learning and representation in which features, instead of being components of a fixed repertoire, are created under the influence of higher-level cognitive processes. When new categories need to be learned, fixed features face one of two problems: (1) High-level features that are directly useful for categorization may not be flexible enough to represent all relevant objects. (2) Low-level features consisting of unstructured fragments (such as pixels) may not capture the regularities required for successful categorization. We report evidence that feature creation occurs in category learning and we describe the conditions that promote it. Feature creation can adapt flexibly to changing environmental demands and may be the origin of fixed feature repertoires. Implications for object categorization, conceptual development, chunking, constructive induction and formal models of dimensionality reduction are discussed.
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Schyns, P. G., Goldstone, R. L., & Thibaut, J. (1998).  Ways of featuring in object categorization.  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 41-49.  (response to commentaries).

Similarity comparisons are highly sensitive to judgment context. Three experiments explore context effects that occur within a single comparison rather than across several trials. Experiment 1 shows reliable intransitivities in which a target is judged to be more similar to stimulus A than to stimulus B, more similar to B than to stimulus C, and more similar to C than to A. Experiment 2 explores the locus of Tversky`s (1977) diagnosticity effect in which the relative similarity of two alternatives to a target is influenced by a third alternative. Experiment 3 demonstrates reliable, though occasional, violations of an assumption of monotonicity. The observed violations of common assumptions to many models of similarity can be accomodated in terms of dynamic property weighting processes based on specific forms of diagnosticity, and contrast sets that are generated when a comparison is presented.
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Goldstone, R. L., Schyns, P. G., & Medin, D. L. (1997). Learning to bridge between perception and cogntion.  in R. L. Goldstone, P. G. Schyns, & D. L. Medin (Eds.)  Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Perceptual Learning, Vol. 36.  (pp. 1-14).  San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

In building models of cognition, it is customary to commence construction on the foundations laid by perception. Perception is presumed to provide us with an initial source of information that is operated upon by subsequent cognitive processes. And, as with the foundation of a house, a premium is placed on stability and solidity. Stable edifices require stable support structures. By this view, our cognitive processes are well behaved to the degree that they can depend upon the stable structures established by our perceptual system.

Considered collectively, the contributions to this volume suggest an alternative metaphor for understanding the relation between perception and cognition. The architectural equivalent of perception may be a bridge rather than a foundation. The purpose of a bridge is to provide support, but they do so by adapting to the supported vehicles. Bridges, by design, sway under the weight of heavy vehicles, built on the principle that it is better to bend than break. Bridges built with rigid materials are often less resilient than their more flexible counterparts. Similarly, the chapters collected here raise the possibility that perception supports cognition by flexibly adapting to the requirements imposed by cognitive tasks. Perception may not be stable, but its departures from stability may facilitate rather than hamper its ability to support cognition. Cognitive processes involved in categorization, comparison, object recognition, and language may shift perception, but perception becomes better tuned to these tasks as a result.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1996). Isolated and Interrelated Concepts. Memory & Cognition, 24, 608-628

A continuum between purely isolated and purely interrelated concepts is described. A concept is interrelated to the extent that it is influenced by other concepts. Methods for manipulating and identiying a concept`s degree of interrelatedness are introduced. Relatively isolated concepts are empirically identified by a relatively large use of nondiagnostic features, and by better categorization performance for a concept`s prototype than for a caricature of the concept. Relatively interrelated concepts are identified by minimal use of nondiagnostic features, and by better categorization performance for a caricature than a prototype. A concept is likely to be relatively isolated when: subjects are instructed to create images for their concepts rather than find discriminating features, concepts are given unrelated labels, and the categories that are displayed alternate rarely between trials. The entire set of manipulations and measurements supports a graded distinction between isolated and interrelated concepts. The distinction is applied to current models of category learning, and a connectionist framework for interpreting the empirical results is presented.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1996). Alignment-based nonmonotonicities in similarity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22, 988-1001.

According to the assumption of monotonicity in similarity judgments, adding a shared feature in common to two items should increase or leave unchanged, but should never decrease, their similarity. Violations of monotonicity are not predicted by feature- or dimension-based models, but can be accommodated by alignment-based models. According to alignment-based models, when structured displays are compared, the parts of one compared display must be aligned, or placed in correspondence with the parts of the other display. In two experiments, evidence for nonmonotonicities is obtained that is generally, although not entirely, consistent with the alignment-based model SIAM (Similarity as Interactive Activation and Mapping; Goldstone, 1994). The primary assumption of the model is that the calculation of similarity involves an interactive activation process whereby correspondences between the parts of compared displays mutually and concurrently influence each other. As SIAM predicts, the occurrence of nonmonotonicities depends on the perceptual similarity of features and the duration of presented comparisons.
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Goldstone, R. L., Steyvers, M., Larimer, K. (1996). Categorical perception of novel dimensions. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp 243-248). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Categorical perception is a phenomenon in which people are better able to distinguish between stimuli along a physical continuum when the stimuli come from different categories than when they come from the same category. In a laboratory experiment with human subjects, we find evidence for categorical perception along a novel dimension that is created by interpolating (i.e. morphing) between two randomly selected bezier curves. A neural network qualitatively models the empirical results with the following assumptions: 1) hidden ÒdetectorÓ unit become specialized for particular stimulus regions with a topologically structured competitive learning algorithm, 2) simultaneously, associations between detectors and category units are learned, and 3) feedback from the category units to the detectors causes the detectors to become concentrated near category boundaries. The particular feedback used, implemented in an "S.O.S. network," operates by increasing the learning rate to detectors that are neighbors to a detector that produces an improper categorization.
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Kroska, A., & Goldstone, R. L. (1996). Dissociations in the similarity and categorisation of emotions. Cognition and Emotion,10, 27-45.

Levine, G. M., Halberstadt, J. B., & Goldstone, R. L. (1996). Reasoning and the weighting of attributes in attitude judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 230-240.

The experiments examined processes by which analyzing reasons may influence attitude judgments. Participants made multiple liking judgments on sets of stimuli that varied along six a priori dimensions. In Study 1, the stimulus set consisted of 64 cartoon faces with six binary-valued attributes (e.g. a straight versus crooked nose). In Study 2, the stimuli were 60 digitized photographs from a college yearbook that varied along six dimensions uncovered through multi-dimensional scaling. In each experiment, half of the participants were instructed to think about the reasons why they liked each face before making their liking rating. Participants` multiple liking ratings were then regressed on the dimension values to determine how they weighted each dimension in their liking judgments. Results support a process whereby reasoning leads to increased variability and inconsistency in the weighting of stimulus information. Results are discussed with respect to Wilson`s model of the disruptive effects of reasoning on attitude judgments (e.g. Wilson, Dunn, Kraft, & Lisle, 1989).
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Goldstone, R. L. (1995). Effects of categorization on color perception. Psychological Science, 6, 298-30

Subjects were shown simple objects and were asked to reproduce the colors of the objects. Even though the objects remained on the screen while the subjects reproduced the colors and the objects` shapes were irrelevant to the subjects` task, subjects` color perceptions were influenced by the shape category of an object. For example, objects that belonged to categories with redder objects were judged to be more red than identically colored objects belonging to another category. Further experiments showed thatX the object categories that subjects use, rather than being fixed, depend on the objects to which subjects are exposed.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1995). Mainstream and avant-garde similarity. Psychologica Belgica, 35, 145-165.

In the first part of this article, empirical evidence is reviewed that suggests a substantial amount of flexibility and context-sensitivity in peopleUs judgments of similarity. Four examples of flexible similarity from our laboratory are considered in detail. In the second part of the article, evidence for relatively constrained, invariant similarity assessments is considered. In the final section, a resolution to these apparently contradictory views on similarity is proposed. Assessments of similarity are used to make inferences from one entity to another. In some situations, flexible similarity is needed to tailor inferences to oneUs knowledge of the entities and their relations. In other situations, particularly those in which specific knowledge is missing or unavailable, a relatively constant similarity is needed to establish generally permissible inferences. Thus, the flexibility and stability of similarity may reflect its different cognitive uses.
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Medin, D. L., & Goldstone, R. L. (1995). The predicates of similarity. In C. Cacciari (Ed.), Similarity in Language, Thought, and Perception. (pp. 83-110). Brussels: BREPOL.

Medin, D. L., Goldstone, R. L., & Markman, A. (1995). Comparison and choice: Relations between similarity processes and decision processes. Psychonomics Bulletin and Review, 2, 1-19.

Research and theory in decision making and in similarity judgment have developed along parallel paths. We review and analyze phenomena in both domains that suggest that similarity processing and decision making share important correspondences. The parallels are explored at the level of empirical generalizations and underlying processing principles. Important component processes that are shared by similarity judgments and decision making include generation of alternatives, recruitment of reference points, dynamic weighting of aspects, creation of new descriptors, development of correspondences between items, and justification of judgement.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1995). Many categories, few structures. Contemporary Psychology, 40, 147-149.

Goldstone, R. L. (1994). Influences of categorization on perceptual discrimination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123, 178-200.

Four experiments investigated the influence of categorization training on perceptual discriminations. Ss were trained according to 1 of 4 different categorization regimes. Subsequent to category learning, Ss performed a Same-Different judgement task. Ss` sensitivities (d`s) for discriminating between items that varied on a category(ir)relevant dimensions were measured. Evidence for acquired distinctiveness (increased perceptual sensitivity for items that are categorized differently) was obtained. One case of acquired equivalence (decreased perceptual sensitivity for items that are categorized together) was found for separable, but not integral, dimensions. Acquired equivalence within a categorization-relevant dimension was never found for either integral or separable dimensions. The relevance of the results for theories of perceptual learning, dimensional attention, categorical perception, and categorization are discussed.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1994). The role of similarity in categorization: Providing a groundwork. Cognition, 52, 125-157.

Goldstone, R. L. (1994). Similarity, Interactive Activation, and Mapping. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 3- 28.

The question of "what makes things seem similar?" is important both for the pivotal role of similarity in theories of cognition and for an intrinsic interest in how people make comparisons. Similarity frequently involves more than listing the features of the things to be compared and comparing the lists for overlap. Often, the parts of one thing must be aligned or placed in correspondence with the parts of the other. The quantitative model with the best overall fit to human data assumes an interactive activation process whereby correspondences between the parts of compared things mutually and concurrently influence each other. An essential aspect of this model is that matching and mismatching features influence similarity more if they belong to parts that are placed in correspondence. In turn, parts are placed in correspondence if they have many features in common and if they are consistent with other developing correspondences.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1994). An efficient method for obtaining similarity data. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 26, 381-386.

Measurements of similarity have typically been obtained through the use of rating, sorting, and perceptual confusion tasks. In the present paper, a new method of measuring similarity is described, in which subjects rearrange items so that their proximity on a computer screen is proportional to their similarity. This method provides very efficient data collection. If a display has n objects, then, after subjects have rearranged the objects (requiring slightly more than n movements), n(n-1)/2 pairwise similarityes can be recorded. As long as the constraints imposed by two-diminsional space are not too different from those intrinsic to psychological similarity, the technique apears to offer an efficient, user-friendly, and intuitive process for measuring psychological similarity.

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Goldstone, R. L. (1994). Categorization. Science, 265, 552. [review of Estes` Classification and Cognition]

Goldstone, R. L., & Kruschke, J. K. (1994). Are rules and instances subserved by separate systems? [A commentary on Shanks and St. John]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17, 405.

Goldstone, R. L., & Medin, D. L. (1994). The time course of comparison. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 29-50.

Similarity as interactive activation and mapping (SIAM), a model of the dynamic course of similarity comparisons, is presented. According to SIAM, when structured scenes are compared, the parts of one scene must be aligned, or placed in correspondence, with the parts from the other scene. Emerging correspondences influence each other in a manner such that, with sufficient time, the strongest correspondences are those that are globally consistent with other correspondences. Relative to globally inconsistent feature matches, globally consistent feature matches influence similarity more when greater amounts of time are given for a comparison. A common underlying process model of scene alignment accounts for commonalities between different task conditions. Differences between task conditions are accounted for by principled parametric variation within the model.
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Goldstone, R.L., & Medin, D.L. (1994). Interactive activation, similarity, and mapping: An overview. in K. Holyoak and J. Barnden (Eds.) Advances in Connectionist and Neural Computation Theory, Vol. 2: Analogical Connections. (pp. 321-362). Ablex : New Jersey.

Goldstone, R. L., & Schyns, P. (1994). Learning new features of representation. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 974-978). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

One productive and influential approach to cognition maintains that categorization, object recognition, and higher-level cognitive processes operate on the output of lower-level perceptual processing.That is, our perceptual systems provide us with a set of fixed features. These features are the inputs to higher-level cognitive processes.

 Recently, researchers in psychology, computer science, and philosophy have questioned this unidirectional approach, arguing that in many situations, the high-level cognitive process being executed has an influence on the lower-level features that are created. For example, in addition to categorization being based on featural descriptions of objects, it might also be the case that the categorization process partially creates the featural decriptions that are used. Rather than viewing the "vocabulary" of primitives to be fixed by low-level processes, this view maintains that the vocabulary is dependent on the higher-level process that uses the vocabulary. This symposium will investigate several issues related to bidirectional interactions between high-level and low-level cognitive processes.

McGraw, G., Rehling, J., & Goldstone, R. L. (1994). Letter perception: Toward a conceptual approach. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 613-618). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

We present the results of a simple experiment in lower-case letter recognition. Unlike most psychology studies of letter recognition, we include in our data set letters at the extremes of their categories and investigate the recognition of letters of multiple typefaces. We are interested in the relationship between the recognition of normal letters and the recognition of non-standard letters. Results provide empirical evidence for top-down conceptual constrains on letter perception in the form of roles and relations between perceptually-based stuctural subcomponents. A process model based on the hypothesis developed below is currently being implemented.
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Pevtzow, R., & Goldstone, R. L. (1994). Categorization and the parsing of objects. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 717-722). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Several models of categorization suggest that fixed inputs (features) are combined together to create categorization rules. It is also possible that categorization influences what features are perceived and used. This experiment explored the possibility that categorization training influences how an object is decomposed into parts. In the first part of this experiment, subjects learned to categorize objects based on particular sets of line segments. Following categorization training, subjects were tested in a whole-part decomposition task, making speeded judgements of "does whole X contain probe Y." All diagnostic and nondiagnostic category parts were used as parts within the whole objects, and as probes. Categorization training in the first part of the experiment affected performance on the second task. In particular, subjects were faster to respond when the whole object contained a part that was diagnostic for categorization than when it contained a nondiagnostic part. When the probe was a diagnostic category part subjects were faster to respond that it was present than absent, and when the probe was a nondiagnostic part, subjects were faster to respond that it was absent than that it was present. These results are discussed in terms of perceptual sensitivity, response bias, and the modulating influence of experience.

Goldstone, R. L. (1993). Feature distribution and biased estimation of visual displays. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 19, 564-579.

Perceptual equivalents of confirmation biases and framing effects are observed in subjects` estimates of feature numerosity. Subjects are asked to estimate the percentage of display items that have a particular feature. Features either are randomly distributed or are spatially clustered such that features of the same type tend to be close. Subjects systematically overestimate the prevalence of features in clustered displays. The pattern of results is best explained by a reional salience bias: Features tend to be more salient if they belong to regions that have a high concentration of instruction-mentioned features. The regional salience bias is contrasted with a feature salience bias: Features tend to be more salient if they are mentioned in the instructions. The relations among the observed perceptual bias and traditional confirmation biases, numeric estimation, and attention are discussed.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1993). Evidence for interrelated and isolated concepts from prototype and caricature classifications. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 498-503). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Previous research (Goldstone, 1991) has suggested that concepts differ in their degree of dependency on other concepts. While some concepts` characterizations depend on other simultaneously acquired concepts, other concepts are relatively isolated. The current experiments provide a new measure of a concept`s interrelatedness/isolation. It is assumed that if the prototype of a concept is classified with greater accuracy than a caricature, then the concept is relatively independent of the influences of other concepts. If a caricature is more easily categorized than the prototype, then the concept is relatively dependent on other concepts. If these assumptions are made, then the current experiments provide converging support for a interrelated/isolated distinction. Instructing subjects to form images of the concepts to be acquired, or infrequently alternating categories during presentation, yields relatively isolated concepts. Instructing subjects to try to discriminate between concepts, or frequently alternative categories, yields relatively interrelated concepts.

Goldstone, R. L., & Chin, C. (1993). Dishonesty in self-report of copies made: Moral relativity and the Xerox machine. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 14, 19-32.

This study involved noninvasive observation of copy-machine use at a university institution. Patrons` self-reports of copies were compared to the actual number of copies made. Results indicate a systematic underreporting of actual copies. Intermediate-level dishonesty is common place, whereby patrons underestimate the number of copies made but refrain from profit-maximizing dishonesty even in the absence of an external monitor. The percentage of copies unreported is approximately constant over different copy job sizes. There are strong self-imposed constraints on the level of allowed dishonesty. However, there is an increased tendency for intermediate-level dishonesty as copy job size increases. Nonreporting of copies and correct reporting of copies are both common for small jobs. There is an empirical dissociation between the prevalence and the degree of dishonest behaviors, interpretable in terms of different motivations that arise when financial gains are high and low. The results are also diagnostic in assessing the nature of the tradeoff between the competing motivations to maximize financial profits and to behave honestly.

Goldstone, R. L. (1993). Human Cognition, and the More General Case. Contemporary Psychology, 38, 61-62.

Medin, D.L., Goldstone, R.L., & Gentner, D. (1993). Respects for similarity. Psychological Review, 100, 254-278.

This article reviews the status of similarity as an explanatory construct with a focus on similarity judgements. For similarity to be a useful construct, one must be able to specify the ways or respects in which two things are similar. One solution to this problem is to restruct the notion of similarity to hard-wired perceptual processes. It is argued that this view is too narrow and limiting. Instead, it is proposed that an important source of constraints derives from the similarity comparison process itself. Both new experiments and other evidence are described that support the idea that respects are determined by processes internal to comparisons.
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Goldstone, R. L. (1992). Locally-to-globally consistent processing in similarity. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 337-342). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Aha, D. W., and Goldstone, R. L. (1992). Concept learning and flexible weighting. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 534-539). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

We previously introduced an exemplar model, named GCM-ISW, that exploits a highly flexible weighting scheme. Or simulations showed that it records faster learning rates and higher asymptotic accuracies on several artificial categorization tasks than models with more limited abilities to warp input spaces. This paper extends our previous work; it describes experimental results that suggest human subjects also invoke such highly flexible schemes. In particular, our model provides significantly better fits than models with less flexibility, and we hypothesize that humans selectively weight attributes depending on an item`s location in the input space.

Goldstone, R. L. (1991). Feature diagnosticity as a tool for investigating positively and negatively defined concepts. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 263-268). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Two methods of representing concepts are distinguished and empirically investigated. Negatively defined concepts are defined in terms of other concepts at the same level of abstraction. Positively defined concepts do not make recourse to other concepts at the same level of abstraction for their definition. In two experiments, subjects are biased to represent concepts underlying visual patterns in a positive manner by instructing subjects to form an image of the learned concepts and by initially training subjects on minimally distorted concept instances. Positively defined concepts are characterized by a large use of nondiagnostic features in concept representations, relative to negatively defined concepts. The distinction between positively and negatively defined concepts can account for the dual nature of natural concepts - as directly accessed during the recognition of items, and is intricately interconnected to other concepts.

Goldstone, R. L., Medin, D. L., & Gentner, D. (1991). Relational similarity and the nonindependence of features in similarity judgments. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 222-264

Four experiments examined the hypothesis that simple attributional features and relational features operate differently in the determination of similarity judgements. Forced choice similarity judgments ("Is X or Y more similar to Z?") and similarity rating tasks demonstrate that making the same featural change in two geometric stimuli unequally affects their judged similarity to a third stimulus (the comparison stimulus). More specifically, a featural change that causes stimuli to be more superficially similar and less relationally similar increases judged similarity if it occurs in stimuli that already share many superficial attributes, and decreases similarity if it occurs in stimuli that do not share as many superficial attributes. These results argue against an assumption of feature independence which asserts that the degree to which a feature shared by two objects affects similarity is independent of the other features shared by the objects. The MAX hypothesis is introduced, in which attributional and relational similarities are separately pooled, and shared features affect similarity more if the pool they are in is already relatively large. The results support claims that relations and attributes are psychologically distinct and that formal measures of similarity should not treat all types of matching features equally.
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Medin, D. L., Goldstone, R. L. (1991). Concepts. In B. Blackwell (Ed.) Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology (pp 77-83). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aha, D. W., and Goldstone, R. L. (1990). Learning attribute relevance in context in instance-based learning algorithms. Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 141-148). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

There has been an upsurge of interest, in both artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, in exemplar-based process models of categorization, which preserve specific instances instead of maintaining abstractions derived from them. Recent exemplar-based models provided accurate fits for subject results in a variety of experiments because, in accordance with Shepard`s (1987) observations, they define similarity to degrade exponentially with the distance between instances in psychological space. Although several researchers have shown that an attribute`s relevance in similarity calculations varies according to its context (i.e., the values of the other attributes in the instance and the target concept," previous exemplar models define attribute relevance to be invariant across all instances. This paper introduces the GCM-ISW model, an extension of Nosofsky`s GCM model that uses context-specific attribute weights for categorization tasks. Since several researchers have reported that humans make context-sensitive classification decision, our model will fit subject data more accurately when attribute relevance is context-sensitive. We also introduce a process component for GCM-ISW and show that its learning rate is significantly faster than the rates of both previous exemplar-based process models when attribute relevance varies among instances. GCM-ISM is both computationally more efficient and more psychologically plausible than previous exemplar-based models.

Medin, D. L., Ahn, W-K, Bettger J., Florian, F., Goldstone, R., Lassaline, M., Markman, A., Rubinstein, J., Wisniewski, E. (1990). Safe Takeoffs-Soft Landings. Cognitive Science, 14, 169-178.

Medin, D. L., Goldstone, R. L., & Gentner, D. (1990). Similarity involving attributes and relations: Judgments of similarity and difference are not inverses. Psychological Science, 1, 64-69.

Conventional wisdom and previous research suggest that similarity judgements and difference judgements are inverses of one another. An exception to this rule arises when both relational similarity and attributional similarity are considered. When presented with choices that are relationally or attributionally similar to a standard, human subjects tend to pick the relationally similar choice as more similar to the standard and as more different from the standard. These results not only reinforce the general distinction between attributes and relations but also show that attributes and relations are dynamically distinct in the processes that give rise to similarity and difference judgments.
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Goldstone, R. L., Gentner, D., & Medin, D. L. (1989). Relations Relating Relations. Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 131-138). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

  Matheus, C. J., Rendall, L. R., Medin, D. L., & Goldstone, R. L. (1989). Purpose and conceptual functions: A framework for concept representation and learning in humans and machines. The Seventh Conference of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behavior. Sussex, England.