I ran across the following passage this weekend:
Speed of Processing: Reaction Time. The speed with which subjects can judge statements about category membership is on of the most widely used measures of processing in semantic memory research within the human information-processing framework. Subjects typically are required to respond true or false to statements of the form: X item is a member of Y category, where the dependent variable of interest is reaction time. In such tasks, for natural language categories, responses of true are invariably faster for the items that have been rated more prototypical.
Principles of Categoization by Eleanor Rosch, in Cognition and Categorization, edited by Eleanor Rorsch and Barbara Lloyd, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1978.
This could be part of a topic map authoring UI that asks users to recognize and place subjects into categories. The faster a user responds, the greater the confidence in their answer.
I borrowed the book where the essay appears to read Amos Tversky’s challenge to the geometric approach to similarity. More on that later this week.