Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Symmetry perception is an important cognitive process across many areas of cognition. This research explores symmetry as a special case of similarity—self-similarity—and proposes that qualitative relationships play a role in the early perception of symmetry. To support this claim, we present evidence from two psychological studies where subjects performed synmietry judgments for randomly constructed polygons. Subjects were faster and/or more accurate at detecting asymmetry for stimuli with qualitative asymmetries than for stimuli with equivalent quantitative asymmetries. Aspects of this effect are replicated using the MAGI computational model, which detects symmetry using a method of structural alignment. The results of this study suggest that qualitative information influences early perception of symmetry, and provides further support for the MAGI model.