ABSTRACT
The aim of the current work is to incorporate structural information in judgments of similarity. According to the assumption of feature independence, how one feature affects similarity is independent of the values of the other features present. We present three violations of this assumption, all arising from the influence of relations between features and of relations between relations. A shared relation is more important for similarity judgments if it cooccurs with (A) relations that augment the first relation by “pointing in the same direction” as the first relation, (B) relations which are themselves salient, and (C) salient relations that involve the same objects as the first relation. We interpret these results as suggesting that relations do not have separately determined weights or saliences; the weight of a relation depends the relational structure in which it exists. Relations influence each other by creating higher-order relational structures, and also by affecting processing.
