Feldman J
Department of Psychology, Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903, USA.
Nature. 2000 Oct 5;407(6804):630-3. doi: 10.1038/35036586.
One of the unsolved problems in the field of human concept learning concerns the factors that determine the subjective difficulty of concepts: why are some concepts psychologically simple and easy to learn, while others seem difficult, complex or incoherent? This question was much studied in the 1960s but was never answered, and more recent characterizations of concepts as prototypes rather than logical rules leave it unsolved. Here I investigate this question in the domain of Boolean concepts (categories defined by logical rules). A series of experiments measured the subjective difficulty of a wide range of logical varieties of concepts (41 mathematically distinct types in six families--a far wider range than has been tested previously). The data reveal a surprisingly simple empirical 'law': the subjective difficulty of a concept is directly proportional to its Boolean complexity (the length of the shortest logically equivalent propositional formula)--that is, to its logical incompressibility.
人类概念学习领域中尚未解决的问题之一，涉及到决定概念主观难度的因素：为什么有些概念在心理上简单易学，而另一些概念却似乎困难、复杂或不连贯？这个问题在20世纪60年代得到了广泛研究，但从未得到解答，而且最近将概念描述为原型而非逻辑规则的观点也未能解决该问题。在此，我在布尔概念（由逻辑规则定义的类别）领域中研究这个问题。一系列实验测量了各种逻辑类型概念的主观难度（六个类别中有41种数学上不同的类型——比之前测试的范围要广泛得多）。数据揭示了一个惊人简单的经验“法则”：概念的主观难度与其布尔复杂度（最短逻辑等价命题公式的长度）成正比——也就是说，与其逻辑不可压缩性成正比。
