Pairwise Similarity Ratings Research Articles

How to measure lineup fairness: concurrent and predictive validity of lineup-fairness measures

ABSTRACT The current study examined the concurrent and predictive validity of four families of lineup-fairness measures – mock-witness measures, perceptual ratings, face-similarity algorithms, and resultant assessments (assessments based on eyewitness participants’ responses) – with 40 mock crime/lineup sets. A correlation analysis demonstrated weak or non-significant correlations between the mock-witness measures and the algorithms, but the perceptual ratings correlated significantly with both the mock-witness measures and the algorithms. These findings may reflect different task characteristics – pairwise similarity ratings of two faces versus overall similarity ratings for multiple faces – and suggest how to use algorithms in future eyewitness research. The resultant assessments did not correlate with the other families, but a multilevel analysis showed that only the resultant assessments – which are based on actual eyewitness choices – predicted eyewitness performance reliably. Lineup fairness, as measured using actual eyewitnesses, differs from lineup fairness as measured using the three other approaches.

The immutability of valence and arousal in the foundation of emotion.

Over the past century, great debate has ensued regarding the fundamental properties of emotions. The idea that 2 properties-valence and arousal-are critical for emotion and psychologically irreducible has had substantial staying power in the literature. In the present report, we examine whether a third dimension-reflecting the social properties of emotion-might arise if stimuli high in that dimension (i.e., "theoretically social emotions") were included in the task and, or, if social information was primed. We used a similarity-rating task to evaluate whether a dimension representing the "socialness" of emotion-the extent to which emotions are associated with social contexts-might arise as the result of inclusion of emotion words that are theorized to represent "social emotions." In Study 1, we assessed the dimensional structure of 41 different emotion terms (of which 41% were "social emotions") based on pairwise similarity ratings of a subset of the emotion terms. In Study 2, we tested whether priming social information before and during the similarity rating task would shift the emergent dimensional structure of emotion words. Results of multidimensional scaling across both studies indicated that the structure of emotion is best described by 2 dimensions-valence and arousal-and was not influenced by the priming of social information. Contrary to predictions, evidence did not emerge for a third dimension corresponding to socialness, nor any other property. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Exemplar learning reveals the representational origins of expert category perception

Irrespective of whether one has substantial perceptual expertise for a class of stimuli, an observer invariably encounters novel exemplars from this class. To understand how novel exemplars are represented, we examined the extent to which previous experience with a category constrains the acquisition and nature of representation of subsequent exemplars from that category. Participants completed a perceptual training paradigm with either novel other-race faces (category of experience) or novel computer-generated objects (YUFOs) that included pairwise similarity ratings at the beginning, middle, and end of training, and a 20-d visual search training task on a subset of category exemplars. Analyses of pairwise similarity ratings revealed multiple dissociations between the representational spaces for those learning faces and those learning YUFOs. First, representational distance changes were more selective for faces than YUFOs; trained faces exhibited greater magnitude in representational distance change relative to untrained faces, whereas this trained-untrained distance change was much smaller for YUFOs. Second, there was a difference in where the representational distance changes were observed; for faces, representations that were closer together before training exhibited a greater distance change relative to those that were farther apart before training. For YUFOs, however, the distance changes occurred more uniformly across representational space. Last, there was a decrease in dimensionality of the representational space after training on YUFOs, but not after training on faces. Together, these findings demonstrate how previous category experience governs representational patterns of exemplar learning as well as the underlying dimensionality of the representational space.

Emotional expressions reinstate recognition of other-race faces in infants following perceptual narrowing.

Perceptual narrowing occurs in human infants for other-race faces. A paired-comparison task measuring infant looking time was used to investigate the hypothesis that adding emotional expressiveness to other-race faces would help infants break through narrowing and reinstate other-race face recognition. Experiment 1 demonstrated narrowing for White infants viewing neutral Asian faces: whereas 3-month-olds differentiated Asian faces, 6-month-olds did not. Experiment 2 showed that White 6-month-olds differentiated the same Asian faces depicted with angry or happy expressions. Experiments 3 and 4 yielded comparable results for 6- and 9-month-olds tested with Black faces (i.e., narrowing with neutral faces, reinstatement of sensitivity when the faces were presented with emotion). Experiment 5 showed that White 6-month-olds did not differentiate inverted angry or happy Asian faces, and that White 9-month-olds did not differentiate inverted angry or happy Black faces. Looking time during familiarization did not differ for upright neutral and emotional faces, indicating that the expressions did not yield more salient stimuli. Also, consistent with the inversion findings, analyses of the low-level image properties as well as equivalent pairwise similarity ratings obtained from White adults for the neutral and emotional faces indicated that the expressions did not simply create more discriminable stimuli. Without support for the lower-level accounts, we discuss the possibility that the infants processed the communicative intent of the expressions. Because angry faces pose threat and happy faces invite affiliation, expression may create motivation to individuate. Overall, the data suggest that early perceptual-social linkage in face representation can arise via a social-to-perceptual pathway. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual communication of how fabrics feel.

Although product photos and movies are abundantly present in online shopping environments, little is known about how much of the real product experience they capture. While previous studies have shown that movies or interactive imagery give users the impression that these communication forms are more effective, there are no studies addressing this issue quantitatively. We used nine different samples of jeans, because in general fabrics represent a large and interesting product category and specifically because jeans can visually be rather similar while haptically be rather different. In the first experiment we let observers match a haptic stimulus to a visual representation and found that movies were more informative about how objects would feel than photos. In a second experiment we wanted to confirm this finding by using a different experimental paradigm that we deemed a better general paradigm for future studies on this topic: correlations of pairwise similarity ratings. However, the beneficial effect of the movies was absent when using this new paradigm. In the third experiment we investigated this issue by letting people visually observe other people in making haptic similarity judgments. Here, we did find a significant correlation between haptic and visual data. Together, the three experiments suggest that there is a small but significant effect of movies over photos (Experiment 1) but at the same time a significant difference between visual representations and visually perceiving products in reality (Experiments 2 and 3). This finding suggests a substantial theoretical potential for decreasing the gap between virtual and real product presentation.

Brain reading and behavioral methods provide complementary perspectives on the representation of concepts

The advent of brain reading techniques has enabled new approaches to the study of concept representation, based on the analysis of multivoxel activation patterns evoked by the contemplation of individual concepts such as animal concepts. The present fMRI study characterized the representation of 30 animal concepts. Dimensionality reduction of the multivoxel activation patterns underlying the individual animal concepts indicated that the semantic building blocks of the brain's representations of the animals corresponded to intrinsic animal properties (e.g. fierceness, intelligence, size). These findings were compared to behavioral studies of concept representation, which have typically collected pairwise similarity ratings between two concepts (e.g. Henley, 1969). Behavioral similarity judgments, by contrast, indicated that the animals were organized into taxonomically defined groups (e.g. canine, feline, equine). The difference in the results between the brain reading and behavioral approaches might derive from differences in cognitive processing during judging similarities versus contemplating one animal at a time. Brain reading approaches may have an advantage in describing thoughts about an individual concept, owing to the ability to decode brain activation patterns elicited by the brief consideration of a single concept (e.g. word reading) without a complex cognitive or behavioral task (e.g. similarity judgments). On the other hand, some behavioral tasks may tend to evoke a concept from numerous perspectives, yielding a representation of the breadth and sophistication of the concept knowledge. These results suggest that neural and behavioral measures offer complementary perspectives that together characterize the content and structure of concept representations.

Sequential Complexity as a Descriptor for Musical Similarity

We propose string compressibility as a descriptor of temporal structure in audio, for the purpose of determining musical similarity. Our descriptors are based on computing track-wise compression rates of quantised audio features, using multiple temporal resolutions and quantisation granularities. To verify that our descriptors capture musically relevant information, we incorporate our descriptors into similarity rating prediction and song year prediction tasks. We base our evaluation on a dataset of 15500 track excerpts of Western popular music, for which we obtain 7800 web-sourced pairwise similarity ratings. To assess the agreement among similarity ratings, we perform an evaluation under controlled conditions, obtaining a rank correlation of 0.33 between intersected sets of ratings. Combined with bag-of-features descriptors, we obtain performance gains of 31.1% and 10.9% for similarity rating prediction and song year prediction. For both tasks, analysis of selected descriptors reveals that representing features at multiple time scales benefits prediction accuracy.

Predicting judged similarity of natural categories from their neural representations

We report a combined behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of conceptual similarity among members of a natural category (mammals). The study examined the relationship between computed pairwise similarity of neural responses to viewed mammals (e.g. bear, camel, dolphin) and subjective pairwise similarity ratings of the same set of mammals, obtained from subjects after the scanning session. In each functional region of interest (fROI), measures of neural similarity were compared to behavioral ratings. fROIs were identified as clusters of voxels that discriminated intact versus scrambled images of mammals (no information about similarity was used to define fROIs). Neural similarity was well correlated with behavioral ratings in fROIs covering the lateral occipital complex in both hemispheres (with overlap of the fusiform and inferior temporal gyri on the right side). The latter fROIs showed greater hemodynamic response to intact versus scrambled images of mammals whereas the fROIs that failed to predict similarity showed the reverse pattern. The findings provide novel evidence that information about the fine structure of natural categories is coarsely coded in regions of the ventral visual pathway. Implications for the theory of inductive inference are discussed.

Exemplar by feature applicability matrices and other Dutch normative data for semantic concepts

Features are at the core of many empirical and modeling endeavors in the study of semantic concepts. This article is concerned with the delineation of features that are important in natural language concepts and the use of these features in the study of semantic concept representation. The results of a feature generation task in which the exemplars and labels of 15 semantic categories served as cues are described. The importance of the generated features was assessed by tallying the frequency with which they were generated and by obtaining judgments of their relevance. The generated attributes also featured in extensive exemplar by feature applicability matrices covering the 15 different categories, as well as two large semantic domains (that of animals and artifacts). For all exemplars of the 15 semantic categories, typicality ratings, goodness ratings, goodness rank order, generation frequency, exemplar associative strength, category associative strength, estimated age of acquisition, word frequency, familiarity ratings, imageability ratings, and pairwise similarity ratings are described as well. By making these data easily available to other researchers in the field, we hope to provide ample opportunities for continued investigations into the nature of semantic concept representation. These data may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Dutch norm data for 13 semantic categories and 338 exemplars

A data set is described that includes eight variables gathered for 13 common superordinate natural language categories and a representative set of 338 exemplars in Dutch. The category set contains 6 animal categories (reptiles, amphibians, mammals, birds, fish, and insects), 3 artifact categories (musical instruments, tools, and vehicles), 2 borderline artifact-natural-kind categories (vegetables and fruit), and 2 activity categories (sports and professions). In an exemplar and a feature generation task for the category nouns, frequency data were collected. For each of the 13 categories, a representative sample of 5-30 exemplars was selected. For all exemplars, feature generation frequencies, typicality ratings, pairwise similarity ratings, age-of-acquisition ratings, word frequencies, and word associations were gathered. Reliability estimates and some additional measures are presented. The full set of these norms is available in Excel format at the Psychonomic Society Web archive, www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Faculty Perceptions of Academic Dishonesty: A Multidimensional Scaling Analysis

Faculty perceptions of twenty-eight academic behaviors were explored using multidimensional scaling of pairwise similarity ratings, a methodology that does not impose the researchers' a priori conceptions of the relevant dimensions. Results indicated that faculty perceive academically dishonest behavior in two dimensions: Seriousness and Papers versus Exams.

An Empirical Examination of Metacognitive Models of Situation Assessment

This research questioned whether participants' metacognitive models of abstract cognitive components of situation assessment were correlated with performance on concrete experimental tasks necessitating situation assessment. In this experiment, 76 naval officers were asked to (a) represent as graphic weighted networks their metacognitive models of schema-driven tactical decision making, for which situation assessment is crucial, and (b) perform experimental tasks requiring categorizing and pairwise similarity ratings of tactical situations. Canonical, regression, and correlation analyses and multidimensional scaling established that 2 of 4 metacognitive link weights were significantly associated with (a) 3 of 6 measures of sorting performance and (b) 1 of 2 dimensions derived for the scaling solution of pairwise similarity ratings. These results partially supported what was theorized regarding individuals' metacognitive models and sorting and pairwise performance.

Individual Differences in Metacognitive Decision Making and Situation Assessment

28 senior naval officers (experts) and 48 junior naval officers (novices) (1) categorized tactical situations, (2) performed pairwise similarity ratings of them, and (3) represented their metacognitive models of tactical decision making as graphic weighted networks. Multidimensional scaling was conducted employing subjects’ pairwise similarity ratings of tactical situations. Using classification measures and multidimensional weights as dependent variables and salient metacognitive link weights as independent variables, two one-way multivariate analyses of covariance between experts and novices and associated statistics were computed. Some of the results of canonical and regression analyses and product-moment correlations validated an important aspect of a metacognitive model of naturalistic schema-driven tactical decision making. They established significant associations of the two link weights connecting event sequence and similarity recognition to situation assessment with actual performances on the two experimental tasks requiring situation assessment. These findings demonstrated (1) the importance of event sequence and similarity recognition as necessary input to situation assessment, and (2) these two metacognitive links are significantly associated with the recognition of similar scenarios. Experts and novices did not differ significantly in (1) the number of categories, scenarios per category, and times to classify the tactical situations during sorting and resorting, and (2) their derived weights along the two dimensions, warfare tempo and reaction time, of the multidimensional scaling solution.

UNDERSTANDING MOUTHFEEL ATTRIBUTES: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALING APPROACH

ABSTRACTMultidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to study qualitative relationships among mouthfeel attributes encountered in oral healthcare products. Similarity estimates were obtained from a rapid sorting task and from pairwise similarity ratings. Configurations were interpreted as suggesting four groupings of oral sensations: numbing, astringency, pain and taste. The pain‐associated sensations were further differentiated into thermally related sensations and chemically related sensations in some configurations. Two‐dimensional solutions from the sorting task and from group‐averaged similarity ratings were similar. Individual differences scaling solutions, however, showed unacceptably high stress in two dimensions, suggesting additional nuances in meaning to individual panelists that were not captured by group‐averaged data or by sorting data.

Probing the mental models of system state categories with multidimensional scaling

Identifying the underlying decision criteria used by people to classify system state is one of the major challenges facing designers of decision aids for complex systems. This research describes the use of multidimensional scaling (MDS) to probe the structure and composition of the mental models employed by users to identify system state, and to evaluate the impact of different display formats on those models. Twenty people were trained to classify instances of system data. Pairwise similarity ratings of instances of system data were analysed by MDS to reveal the dominant dimensions used in the task. Results showed that significant individual differences emerged, and that the dimensions used by people were also a function of the type of display format.

Multidimensional Scaling of Sorting Data: A Comparison of Three Procedures.

Dissimilarity measures (D) derived from sortings of stimuli can be submitted to multidimensional scaling (MDS) either directly, or after transforming them to profile distances (Δ) computed on the rows of the D matrix. The latter procedure was criticized by Drasgow and Jones (1979) who performed two simulation studies, which are criticized here in turn. In the present article two sets of real sorting data were used for comparing the results of MDS on D and Δ, both with each other and with the results of two other procedures: multiple correspondence analysis (by means of HOMALS) on the raw sorting data, and MDS on the pairwise similarity ratings of the same stimuli by the same subjects. The three procedures were compared both with respect to the final configurations and with regard to the fit of the corresponding distances to the data. These comparisons suggested that MDS on D is slightly superior to MDS on Δ. The latter analysis, however, yields results that are similar to those of the much more efficient HOMALS program. The differences, however, are on the average very small.

Deriving Menu Structures through Modal Block Clustering: A Promising Alternative to Hierarchical Techniques

Modal block clustering (MBC) is proposed as an approach more suited to the derivation of menu structures than hierarchical clustering techniques. Problems with the application of hierarchical techniques and pairwise similarity ratings (PWSR) from which the clusters are derived are discussed. MBC defines clusters based on the pattern of common command attributes and provides an objective way to determine the composition and number of menu panels to include in a menu structure. The method also objectively defines command redundancy for the menu panels. The method of MBC was applied to the 97 commands that comprise the CMS operating system resulting in 17 menu categories. The menu categories were used to design a help menu system. The MBC procedure provides a viable methodology for complex systems, such as CMS, which derive increased functionality from numerous command options. System designers can fruitfully and efficiently apply this methodology both to current systems and to proposed systems for which there are no expert users.

Vocal register change: A study of perceptual and acoustic isomorphism

This study focuses on the perceptual nature of chest and falsetto registers, and on the degree of correspondence between perception and several acoustic measures. Fifteen target notes, ranging from G♯3 to A♯4, were sung by a male and a female subject in the context of ascending and descending sequences on the vowels /i/ and /a/. Register transitions were elicited by setting strict constraints on production, and by minimizing auditory feedback. Segments of 1‐s duration were extracted from the target notes, digitized, acoustically analyzed, and perceptually judged by ten trained listeners. Multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering analyses were utilized to capture the dimensionality and the internal structure of perceptual data sets derived from pairwise similarity ratings. Similar analyses of the acoustic data sets provided a means for evaluating the congruence of each acoustic variable and perception. Optimal spatial representation of the perceptual data required no more than two orthogonal dimensions, with the quality attribute represented by the dominant dimension. The acoustic variables which exhibited the highest degree of isomorphism with perceived registers were characterized by differences in frequency spectra obtained from a set of 1‐oct bandpass filters, and by F0/harmonic ratio. The representation of pitch differences was reflected only in the internal ordering of the stimuli within register, but did not affect the perceptual discontinuity between registers.

The perceptual nature of vocal register change

<h2>Summary</h2> This study focuses on the perceptual nature of chest and falsetto registers as a function of various production tokens and methods of perceptual evaluation. Fifteen target tones, ranging from G#3 to A#4, were sung by a male and a female subject in the context of ascending and descending sequences on the vowels /a/ and /i/. Register transitions were elicited by setting strict constraints on production. Segments of 1-s duration were extracted from the target notes, digitized, and acoustically analyzed. These excerpts were presented to ten trained listeners in four different perceptual tasks. Identification and discrimination tasks yielded nearly identical results, suggesting that the primary registers are perceived as distinct entities. The marked change from chest to falsetto as well as the locus of the transition between these registers did not vary systematically as a function of production token or perceptual task. Mean register shift-point frequencies of the male and female subjects were perceived at 320 Hz and 353 Hz, respectively. Multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering analyses were utilized to capture the dimensionality and the internal structure of perceptual data sets derived from the pair-wise similarity ratings. Optimal spatial representation of these data required no more than two orthogonal dimensions, with the quality attribute represented by the dominant dimension. The representation of pitch differences was reflected only in the internal ordering of the stimuli within registers, but did not affect the perceptual discontinuity between registers.

A Multidimensional Scaling of Video Games

Ten video games currently used in commercial markets were subjected to pairwise similarity ratings. A multidimensional scaling of the responses revealed three underlying dimensions that accounted for 30% of the variance: destructiveness, dimensionality, and graphic quality. These three dimensions are readily interpretable, can be embedded within personality and motivation literatures, and have application to the design of computer-based training devices.