Casasanto, D. (2008). Similarity and proximity: When does close in space mean close in mind? Memory & Cognition, 36, 1047–1056.

People often describe things that are similar as close and things that are dissimilar as far apart. Does the way people talk about similarity reveal something fundamental about the way they conceptualize it? Three experiments tested the relationship between similarity and spatial proximity that is encoded in metaphors in language. Similarity ratings for pairs of words or pictures varied as a function of how far apart the stimuli appeared on the computer screen, but the influence of distance on similarity differed depending on the type of judgments the participants made. Stimuli presented closer together were rated more similar during conceptual judgments of abstract entities or unseen object properties but were rated less similar during perceptual judgments of visual appearance. These contrasting results underscore the importance of testing predictions based on linguistic metaphors experimentally and suggest that our sense of similarity arises from our ability to combine available perceptual information with stored knowledge of experiential regularities.

Boot, I. & Pecher, D. (2010) Similarity is closeness: Metaphorical mapping in a perceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 942-954.

The conceptual metaphor theory states that abstract concepts are represented by image schemas from concrete domains. In the present study we investigated the mapping for SIMILARITY IS CLOSENESS using tasks with nonlinguistic materials. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants decided whether two squares were similar or dissimilar in colour. The spatial distance between the squares was varied. Performance to similar colours was better at shorter distances, whereas performance to dissimilar colours was better at longer distances. In Experiments 3 and 4 participants made distance decisions to similar and dissimilar colours squares. Performance was not affected by similarity. These results show that metaphorical mappings can be found even beyond the context of linguistic metaphors and that the mapping between SIMILARITY and CLOSENESS is asymmetrical.

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Eksperiment se bavio metaforom SLIČNO JE BLIZU. Mjereno je vrijeme reakcije i točnost odgovora ispitanika u zadatku kategorizacije parova riječi na semantički slične ili različite, pri čemu su parovi riječi prikazivani ili udaljeni ili blizu na ekranu. Rad je prezentiran na 22. psihologijskom skupu Dani Ramira i Zorana Bujasa u Zagrebu.