Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Current theories and supporting simulations of similaritybased retrieval disagree in their process model of semantic similarity decisions. We compare two current computational simulations of similarity-based retrieval, MAC/FA C and ARCS, with particular attention to the semantic similarity models used in each. Four experiments are presented comparing the performance of these simulations on a common set of representations. The results suggest that MAC/FAC, with its identicality-based ccmstraint on semantic similarity, provides a better account of retrieval than ARCS, with its similarity-table based model.