Rehder B, Ross B H
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York 10003, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2001 Sep;27(5):1261-75. doi: 10.1037//0278-7393.27.5.1261.
Many studies have demonstrated the importance of the knowledge that interrelates features in people's mental representation of categories and that makes our conception of categories coherent. This article focuses on abstract coherent categories, coherent categories that are also abstract because they are defined by relations independently of any features. Four experiments demonstrate that abstract coherent categories are learned more easily than control categories with identical features and statistical structure, and also that participants induced an abstract representation of the category by granting category membership to exemplars with completely novel features. The authors argue that the human conceptual system is heavily populated with abstract coherent concepts, including conceptions of social groups, societal institutions, legal, political, and military scenarios, and many superordinate categories, such as classes of natural kinds.
许多研究都证明了一种知识的重要性，这种知识将人们对范畴的心理表征中的特征相互联系起来，并使我们对范畴的概念保持连贯。本文关注的是抽象连贯范畴，即那些也是抽象的连贯范畴，因为它们是由关系定义的，独立于任何特征。四项实验表明，抽象连贯范畴比具有相同特征和统计结构的控制范畴更容易学习，而且参与者通过将范畴成员资格赋予具有全新特征的范例，诱导出了该范畴的抽象表征。作者认为，人类概念系统中充斥着大量抽象连贯概念，包括社会群体概念、社会制度概念、法律、政治和军事场景概念，以及许多上位范畴，如自然种类的类别。
