Psychology 3130A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Dependent And Independent Variables, Context-Dependent Memory, Pattern Matching

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3130A/B
• Professor: John Paul Minda

Document Summary

Similarity is a construct that is easy to recognize but difficult to describe or define. Comparing 2 photos of dogs is similar to seeing the dogs in person or asked to recall an image from memory. As soon as similarity is domain general, and seems to be universal, one must account for the incredible flexibility and fluidity that exists in how people understand and rate similarity: eg. Comparing an american penny and an american penny: they are quite similar in shape, composition and their role in the monetary system, they are from different countries. Similarity is flexible; there is more than one kind of similarity: there can be similarity between and among objects at different levels. Similarity plays a role in many core cognitive processes and plays an important role in many higher order thoughts. The process of visually recognizing objects in the world. Semantic memory retrieval is another example of similarities and the thinking process.