REPRESENTATION OF OBJECT SIMILARITY IN HUMAN VISION - PSYCHOPHYSICS AND A COMPUTATIONAL MODEL

We report results from perceptual judgment, delayed matching to sample and long-term memory recall experiments, which indicate that the huma n visual system can support metrically veridical representations of si milarities among 3D objects. In all the experiments, animal-like compu ter-rendered stimuli formed regular planar configurations in a common 70-dimensional parameter space. These configurations were fully recove red by multidimensional scaling from proximity tables derived from the subject data. We show that such faithful representation of similarity is possible if shapes are encoded by their similarities to a number o f reference (prototypical) shapes, as in the computational model that accompanies the psychophysical data. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. Al l rights reserved.