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The present paper is a review of the literature dealing with current models of categorization and similarity estimation. The first part reviews models of concept representations based on notions such as features and dimensions. In the case of dimensional representations, each stimulus is defined as a point in a multidimensional space and the similarity between two stimuli is a function of the distance between the corresponding points in the space. In the case of feature representations, a stimulus is defined in terms of features and the similarity between two stimuli is a function of their common and distinctive features.
In the second part, we analyze the construction of the feature space that subjects refer to when they have to categorize a stimulus or estimate the similarity between two stimuli. We examine the influence of context and of naive theories on the estimation of similarity. The process of alignment is analyzed. We present a unified view of similarity and categorization based on the notion of a feature space while explaining the dissociations obtained between similarity and categorization.
