Cognitive Psychological Approaches
Mental distance approaches (Shepard, 1962) assume that mental representations can be conceptualized as some kind of mental space. Concepts are represented as points within the space. Similarity between concepts is a function of the distance between the concepts in space. Concepts represented by points that are near to each other are more psychologically similar than are points that are conceptually distant. A strength of this approach is there are many mathematical techniques for deriving spaces from data such as multidimensional scaling (Shepard, 1962) and latent semantic analysis (Laudauer & Dumais, 1997).
Read more about this topic: Similarity (psychology)
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