Abstract
Similarity is demonstrably important across many areas of cognition. At present, the main idea is that the similarity of a pair of objects increase with its commonalities and decrease with its difference. However, it’s difficult to reasonably explain some counterintuitive situations that often occur. For example, people might find that someone looks similar with a dog, even though most shared features are dissimilar. Inspired by the ideas of form and spirit, we speculate that some key features of objects may have a greater impact on similarity judgment than the others. Therefore, this paper proposed a theoretical model of similarity judgment to illustrate the counterintuitive situation, indicating hierarchical or primary-secondary relationship among shared features between objects, expanding the scope of existing similarity theories. This model has potential applications in many aspects such as the development and protection of intellectual property, product design, game and film industries and so on.
Keywords
The Ideas of Form and Spirit, Similarity Measurement; Similarity Judgment Models
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.395
Citation
Wen, Y., Luh, D., and Wu, C. (2020) A Theoretical Model of Similarity Judgment based on Ideas of Form and Spirit, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.395
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
A Theoretical Model of Similarity Judgment based on Ideas of Form and Spirit
Similarity is demonstrably important across many areas of cognition. At present, the main idea is that the similarity of a pair of objects increase with its commonalities and decrease with its difference. However, it’s difficult to reasonably explain some counterintuitive situations that often occur. For example, people might find that someone looks similar with a dog, even though most shared features are dissimilar. Inspired by the ideas of form and spirit, we speculate that some key features of objects may have a greater impact on similarity judgment than the others. Therefore, this paper proposed a theoretical model of similarity judgment to illustrate the counterintuitive situation, indicating hierarchical or primary-secondary relationship among shared features between objects, expanding the scope of existing similarity theories. This model has potential applications in many aspects such as the development and protection of intellectual property, product design, game and film industries and so on.