This document summarizes research on using rival similarity functions in cognitive data analysis and machine learning tasks. It discusses how humans estimate similarities between objects to classify and recognize patterns. It then presents the rival similarity function (FRiS) approach and algorithms like FRiS-GRAD that use FRiS to select informative attributes for tasks like medical diagnosis, object recognition, and data mining competitions. Evaluation on real datasets shows FRiS identifying informative attributes and achieving high recognition rates.