Human similarity judgments do not reliably conform to the predictions of leading theories of psychological similarity. Evidence from the triad similarity judgment task shows that people often identify thematic associates like dog and bone as more similar than taxonomic category members like dog and cat, even though thematic associates lack the type of featural or relational similarity that is foundational to theories of psychological similarity. This specific failure to predict human behavior has been addressed as a consequence of education and other individual differences, an artifact of the triad similarity judgment paradigm, or a shortcoming in psychological accounts of similarity. We investigated the judged similarity of semantically-related concepts (taxonomic category members and thematic associates) as it relates to other task-independent measures of semantic knowledge and access. Participants were assessed on reading and language ability, then event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected during a passive, sequential word reading task that presented pseudowords and taxonomically-related, thematically-related, and unrelated word sequences, and, finally, similarity judgments were collected with the classic two-alternative forced-choice triad task. The results uncovered a correspondence between ERP amplitude and triad-based similarity judgments-similarity judgment behavior reliably predicts ERP amplitude during passive word reading, absent of any instruction to consider similarity. It was also found that individual differences in reading and language ability independently predicted ERP amplitude. This evidence suggests that similarity judgments are driven by reliable patterns of thought that are not solely rooted in the interpretation of task goals or reading and language ability.

中文翻译：

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相似性判断可预测分类类别成员与主题助理之间的N400振幅差异。

人类相似性判断不能可靠地符合心理相似性领先理论的预测。来自三合会相似性判断任务的证据表明，即使主题同伙缺乏以心理相似性理论为基础的特征或关系相似性类型，人们也经常将诸如狗和骨头之类的同伴认定为比诸如狗和猫等分类类别成员更相似。 。由于教育和其他个体差异，三合会相似性判断范式的伪造或相似性的心理学解释中的缺陷，已解决了这种无法预测人类行为的特定失败。我们调查了与语义相关的概念（分类类别成员和主题关联）的判断相似性，因为它与其他与任务无关的语义知识和访问度量相关。对参与者的阅读和语言能力进行了评估，然后在被动的顺序单词阅读任务中收集了与事件相关的电位（ERP），该任务提供了伪单词以及与分类学相关，主题相关和无关的单词序列，最后是相似性判断是通过经典的两选强制选择三合一任务收集的。结果揭示了ERP幅度与基于三合会的相似性判断之间的对应关系-相似性判断行为在被动单词阅读过程中可靠地预测了ERP幅度，而没有任何考虑相似性的指令。还发现阅读和语言能力的个体差异独立预测ERP的幅度。该证据表明，相似性判断是由可靠的思维模式驱动的，而这些思维模式不仅根植于任务目标或阅读和语言能力的解释。