{"pk":30893,"title":"Is There a Default Similarity Distance for Categories?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How do people decide whether or not an item belongs to a new category, the variability o-f which they do not know We postulate that people have a de-fault similarity distance (DSD) which they use when no other in-formation about the variability o-f a category is available. To test our claim, subjects were asked to tell how they would instruct a being from another world to distinguish members o-f a category, by shoMnng pictures. The categories were from different levels thus dif-fering in variability. For highly variable categories subjects tended to present multiple positive instances (thus indicating their extraordinary variability), whereas -for narrow categories they tended to present negative instances (thus explicitly delimiting them). These results indicated that a norm, relative to which additional in-formation is supplied, lay in between. Indeed, there was a level at which subjects apparently relied on DSD, -finding it sufficient to show but a single exemplar of the categor/. This happened with basic-level categories -for 3th graders and adults and with subordinate categories -for 2nd graders, thus demonstrating a developmental trend in what is considered a normal standard category.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Paper Presentations -- Group 1: Reasoning","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pb2r17m","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yaakov","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kareev","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Hebrew University of Jersualem","department":""},{"first_name":"Judith","middle_name":"","last_name":"Avrahami","name_suffix":"","institution":"The Hebrew University of Jersualem","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"1990-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/30893/galley/20742/download/"}]}