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The organization of this chapter is as follows. First, we review the role of mapping and global consistency in both low-level visual perception and abstract analogy and then suggest that mapping and consistency also apply to similarity assessment. Next, we review current models of similarity and note that they have little to say about processes by which corresponding properties are aligned. We then describe some experiments on alignment processes associated with comparisons. We account for these results with an interactive activation model of alignment and contrast this model with a number of alternative.s Finally, we asses the role of mapping or alignment in comparisons more generally and offer some conclusions.

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