On the relationship among identification, similarity, and categorization: Reply to Nosofsky and Smith (1992).

R. M. Nosofsky and J. K. Smith (See PA, Vol 79:33888) challenged the theoretical, methodological, and empirical results of F. G. Ashby and W. W. Lee (1991). This reply (1) shows that models derived from general recognition theory (GRT) can predict categorization from identification without incorporating selective attention, at least in the data sets suggested by Nosofsky and Smith; (2) argues that the categorization processes postulated by GRT are extremely dissimilar to the exemplar-based similarity model proposed by Nosofsky (1986); (3) criticizes Nosofsky and Smith's post hoc analysis of Ashby and Lee's identification-confusion data; (4) answers questions raised by Nosofsky and Smith about the identification and similarity models tested by Ashby and Lee; and (5) argues that with the excellent fits reported by Ashby and Lee (i.e., 99.7% of variance accounted for), least squares and maximum likelihood model fitting procedures lead to similar conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)