The Validated Circular Shape Space: Quantifying the Visual Similarity of Shape

Subjective similarity holds a prominent place in many psychological theories, influencing diverse cognitive processes ranging from attention and categorization to memory and problem solving. Despite the known importance of subjective similarity, there are few resources available to experimenters interested in manipulating the visual similarity of shape, one common type of subjective similarity. Here, across seven validation iterations, we incrementally developed a stimulus space consisting of 360 shapes using a novel image-processing method in conjunction with collected similarity judgments. The result is the Validated Circular Shape space, the first Validated Circular Shape space comparable to the commonly used color wheel, whereby angular distance along a 2D circle is a proxy for visual similarity. This extensively validated resource is freely available to experimenters wishing to precisely manipulate the visual similarity of shape.