Laws K R
London Guildhall University, London, United Kingdom.
Brain Lang. 2000 Oct 15;75(1):123-33. doi: 10.1006/brln.2000.2348.
The importance of "artifactual" variables (such as conceptual familiarity) have been highlighted in current accounts of category-specific disorders for living things (e.g., Funnell & Sheridan, 1992). The difficulties experienced by patients are essentially viewed as an exaggeration of normal processes and the implication is that normal subjects should also have greater difficulty naming living items (because they have lower conceptual familiarity than nonliving things). The current study examined normal subjects' ability to name pictures of artifact-matched sets of living and nonliving things in a naming-to-deadline paradigm. Contrary to the prediction, normal subjects made more nonliving naming errors. Furthermore, female subjects made more nonliving-thing errors than male subjects. These findings could not be reduced to differences in either category-based or gender-based familiarity ratings. Rather, it is proposed that an elaborated domain-specific evolutionary model parsimoniously explains both the greater incidence of living thing deficits in patients and the better performance of normal subjects with living things.
“人为的”变量（如概念熟悉度）的重要性在当前关于生物类别特异性障碍的论述中得到了强调（例如，Funnell和Sheridan，1992）。患者所经历的困难本质上被视为正常过程的一种夸大，这意味着正常受试者在命名生物项目时也应该有更大的困难（因为他们对生物的概念熟悉度低于非生物）。本研究在限时命名范式中考察了正常受试者对与人工制品匹配的生物和非生物图片进行命名的能力。与预测相反，正常受试者在非生物命名上犯的错误更多。此外，女性受试者在非生物命名上犯的错误比男性受试者更多。这些发现不能归结为基于类别或性别的熟悉度评分的差异。相反，有人提出，一个详尽的领域特定进化模型可以简洁地解释患者中生物缺陷发生率更高以及正常受试者在生物方面表现更好的现象。
