Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Identifying similarity plays a major role in spatial reasoning. Prior work has shown that identification of similarity and difference between spatial scenes involves reasoning about their properties at two different levels--surface-level properties, such as color and size, and higher-level compositional properties. The interaction between the use of these property types during reasoning and the degree of similarity or difference between spatial scenes has, however, been largely unstudied. We presented participants with in-progress Tangram puzzles at various stages of similarity to their target image. Participants were asked to identify the puzzle being built and provide an explanation of how they came to that conclusion. Analysis of explanations found an interaction between degree of similarity and preference for reasoning over surface-level or higher-level properties.