Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studies using balanced materials have found that both feature-based comparison and thematic integration play a role inconcept organization (e.g. Mirman & Graziano, 2012; Murphy, 2001), a proposal backed up by neurological findings.This experiment crossed taxonomic and thematic relatedness of abstract vs concrete pairs to examine how these processesaffect perceived similarity. Participants rated similarity of 96 normed word pairs and explained ratings in writing. Linearmixed effect modeling revealed a 3-way interaction on ratings, with taxonomic relatedness affecting ratings more forconcrete than abstract pairs only when a thematic relation was absent. No other abstractness effects were observed. Forcoded explanations, a difference emerged only for pairs related both taxonomically and thematically: concrete pairs wereprocessed more frequently thematically than taxonomically, with the reverse pattern for abstract pairs. Further, qualitativeanalyses of the explanations and Bayesian analyses of the relation between explanations and similarity ratings will bepresented.