Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Universal law of generalization" in English language version.
A canonical law of cognitive science -- the Universal Law of Generalization, introduced in a 1987 article also published in Science -- tells us that your brain makes perceptual decisions based on how similar the new stimulus is to previous experience. Specifically, the law states that the probability you will extend a past experience to new stimulus depends on the similarity between the two experiences, with an exponential decay in probability as similarity decreases. This empirical pattern has proven correct in hundreds of experiments across species including humans, pigeons, and even honeybees.
