Volume 151, June 2024, 101661Author links open overlay panel, , , Abstract

Human judgments of similarity and difference are sometimes asymmetrical, with the former being more sensitive than the latter to relational overlap, but the theoretical basis for this asymmetry remains unclear. We test an explanation based on the type of information used to make these judgments (relations versus features) and the comparison process itself (similarity versus difference). We propose that asymmetries arise from two aspects of cognitive complexity that impact judgments of similarity and difference: processing relations between entities is more cognitively demanding than processing features of individual entities, and comparisons assessing difference are more cognitively complex than those assessing similarity. In Experiment 1 we tested this hypothesis for both verbal comparisons between word pairs, and visual comparisons between sets of geometric shapes. Participants were asked to select one of two options that was either more similar to or more different from a standard. On unambiguous trials, one option was unambiguously more similar to the standard; on ambiguous trials, one option was more featurally similar to the standard, whereas the other was more relationally similar. Given the higher cognitive complexity of processing relations and of assessing difference, we predicted that detecting relational difference would be particularly demanding. We found that participants (1) had more difficulty detecting relational difference than they did relational similarity on unambiguous trials, and (2) tended to emphasize relational information more when judging similarity than when judging difference on ambiguous trials. The latter finding was replicated using more complex story stimuli (Experiment 2). We showed that this pattern can be captured by a computational model of comparison that weights relational information more heavily for similarity than for difference judgments.

Section snippetsProcessing-demand Hypothesis

In the present paper we propose and test an alternative processing-demand hypothesis based on two aspects of cognitive complexity that impact judgments of relational difference. The first factor arises from the content of information that is compared when making these judgments. When human reasoners make comparisons, they tend to do so on the basis of both features of individual entities, and also relations between entities and their component parts. Extensive evidence indicates that processing

Overview

In Experiment 1, we tested the processing-demand hypothesis for both verbal comparisons between word pairs and for visual comparisons between sets of geometric shapes. For both types of stimuli, we measured participants’ sensitivity to featural and relational information in a 2-alternative forced-choice task, in which participants selected which of two options was more similar to or more different from a standard. In order to directly examine the relative difficulty of similarity and difference

Participants

Participants were 184 undergraduate students (Mage = 20.70, SDage = 3.73, range = [18, 51]) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). This sample consisted of 128 female, 51 male, and 3 nonbinary participants; 2 participants did not report their gender. All participants completed experimental tasks online to obtain partial course credit in a psychology class. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at UCLA.

Materials and procedure

Comparison tasks. All participants completed two comparison

Performance on unambiguous trials

Performance on unambiguous trials across conditions is depicted in Fig. 2. For participants making similarity judgments, accurate responding consisted of selecting the more similar option to the standard; and for participants making difference judgments, accurate responding consisted of selected the more different option. Overall, participants performed well on unambiguous trials. Those making similarity judgments (n = 98) more frequently selected the more similar option for both the verbal

Experiment 2

Beyond the special emphasis that structure mapping theory places on alignability, a more general difference between that account and our processing-demand account of comparison involves the processing stage at which each explanation locates the dissociation between similarity and difference comparisons. Structure-mapping theory proposes that judgments of both similarity and difference involve an identical comparison process—structural alignment—which consistently operates over the same

Results and discussion

In general, participants assigned to the incremental-options presentation condition spent more time on each trial (similarity: MRT = 52.26 s, SDRT = 16.77 s; difference: MRT = 59.92 s, SDRT = 24.53 s) than did those in the simultaneous-options condition (similarity: MRT = 45.04 s, SDRT = 22.16 s; difference: MRT = 43.05 s, SDRT = 22.56 s). To test this, we fit a linear mixed-effects model of trial times, using the lmer function from version 1.1.26 of the LME4 R package (Bates et al., 2015) in R

General discussion

Across a wide range of stimulus types (word pairs, sets of simple shapes, and stories), the present findings provide convergent evidence for the claim that assessments of similarity operate on distinct representations than do assessments of difference in that the former incorporate relational information more than do the latter. Our processing-demands hypothesis assumes that this dissociation is ultimately rooted in a processing asymmetry in comparisons assessing similarity and those assessing

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Nicholas Ichien: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Software, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Nyusha Lin: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Investigation. Keith J. Holyoak: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Methodology, Conceptualization. Hongjing Lu: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

Preparation of this paper was supported by NSF Grant BCS-2022369. We thank Angela Kan and Jennifer Lo for help with stimulus generation and data collection. A preliminary report of part of this research was presented at the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (July 2023).

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