{"pk":29478,"title":"Nameability predicts subjective and objective measures of visual similarity","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Do people perceive shapes to be similar based purely on theirphysical features? Or is visual similarity influenced by top-down knowledge? In the present studies, we demonstrate thattop-down information – in the form of verbal labels that peopleassociate with visual stimuli – predicts visual similarity asmeasured using subjective (Experiment 1) and objective(Experiment 2) tasks. In Experiment 1, shapes that werepreviously calibrated to be (putatively) perceptuallyequidistant were more likely to be grouped together if theyshared a name. In Experiment 2, more nameable shapes wereeasier for participants to discriminate from other images, againcontrolling for their perceptual distance. We discuss what theseresults mean for constructing visual stimuli spaces that areperceptually uniform and discuss theoretical implications ofthe fact that perceptual similarity is sensitive to top-downinformation such as the ease with which an object can benamed.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"visual similarity; nameability; perceptuallyuniform; top-down processing; language"}],"section":"Concepts and Systems","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4d531331","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Martin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zettersten","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Wisconsin-Madison","department":""},{"first_name":"Ellise","middle_name":"","last_name":"Suffill","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Wisconsin-Madison","department":""},{"first_name":"Gary","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lupyan","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Wisconsin-Madison","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29478/galley/19338/download/"}]}