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How Category Structure Influences the Perception of Object Similarity: The Atypicality Bias

Why do some faces appear more similar than others? Beyond structural factors, we speculate that similarity is governed by the organization of faces located in a multi-dimensional face space. To test this hypothesis, we morphed a typical face with an atypical face. If similarity judgments are guided...

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Autores principales: Tanaka, James William, Kantner, Justin, Bartlett, Marni
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Research Foundation 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3368386/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22685441
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00147
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author Tanaka, James William
Kantner, Justin
Bartlett, Marni
author_facet Tanaka, James William
Kantner, Justin
Bartlett, Marni
author_sort Tanaka, James William
collection PubMed
description Why do some faces appear more similar than others? Beyond structural factors, we speculate that similarity is governed by the organization of faces located in a multi-dimensional face space. To test this hypothesis, we morphed a typical face with an atypical face. If similarity judgments are guided purely by their physical properties, the morph should be perceived to be equally similar to its typical parent as its atypical parent. However, contrary to the structural prediction, our results showed that the morph face was perceived to be more similar to the atypical face than the typical face. Our empirical studies show that the atypicality bias is not limited to faces, but extends to other object categories (birds) whose members share common shape properties. We also demonstrate atypicality bias is malleable and can change subject to category learning and experience. Collectively, the empirical evidence indicates that perceptions of face and object similarity are affected by the distribution of stimuli in a face or object space. In this framework, atypical stimuli are located in a sparser region of the space where there is less competition for recognition and therefore, these representations capture a broader range of inputs. In contrast, typical stimuli are located in a denser region of category space where there is increased competition for recognition and hence, these representation draw a more restricted range of face inputs. These results suggest that the perceived likeness of an object is influenced by the organization of surrounding exemplars in the category space.
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spelling pubmed-33683862012-06-08 How Category Structure Influences the Perception of Object Similarity: The Atypicality Bias Tanaka, James William Kantner, Justin Bartlett, Marni Front Psychol Psychology Why do some faces appear more similar than others? Beyond structural factors, we speculate that similarity is governed by the organization of faces located in a multi-dimensional face space. To test this hypothesis, we morphed a typical face with an atypical face. If similarity judgments are guided purely by their physical properties, the morph should be perceived to be equally similar to its typical parent as its atypical parent. However, contrary to the structural prediction, our results showed that the morph face was perceived to be more similar to the atypical face than the typical face. Our empirical studies show that the atypicality bias is not limited to faces, but extends to other object categories (birds) whose members share common shape properties. We also demonstrate atypicality bias is malleable and can change subject to category learning and experience. Collectively, the empirical evidence indicates that perceptions of face and object similarity are affected by the distribution of stimuli in a face or object space. In this framework, atypical stimuli are located in a sparser region of the space where there is less competition for recognition and therefore, these representations capture a broader range of inputs. In contrast, typical stimuli are located in a denser region of category space where there is increased competition for recognition and hence, these representation draw a more restricted range of face inputs. These results suggest that the perceived likeness of an object is influenced by the organization of surrounding exemplars in the category space. Frontiers Research Foundation 2012-06-06 /pmc/articles/PMC3368386/ /pubmed/22685441 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00147 Text en Copyright © 2012 Tanaka, Kantner and Bartlett. http://www.frontiersin.org/licenseagreement This is an openaccess article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited.
spellingShingle Psychology
Tanaka, James William
Kantner, Justin
Bartlett, Marni
How Category Structure Influences the Perception of Object Similarity: The Atypicality Bias
title How Category Structure Influences the Perception of Object Similarity: The Atypicality Bias
title_full How Category Structure Influences the Perception of Object Similarity: The Atypicality Bias
title_fullStr How Category Structure Influences the Perception of Object Similarity: The Atypicality Bias
title_full_unstemmed How Category Structure Influences the Perception of Object Similarity: The Atypicality Bias
title_short How Category Structure Influences the Perception of Object Similarity: The Atypicality Bias
title_sort how category structure influences the perception of object similarity: the atypicality bias
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3368386/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22685441
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00147
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