Rehder Bob, Hastie Reid
Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA.
Cognition. 2004 Mar;91(2):113-53. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(03)00167-7.
One important property of human object categories is that they define the sets of exemplars to which newly observed properties are generalized. We manipulated the causal knowledge associated with novel categories and assessed the resulting strength of property inductions. We found that the theoretical coherence afforded to a category by inter-feature causal relationships strengthened inductive projections. However, this effect depended on the degree to which the exemplar with the to-be-projected predicate manifested or satisfied its category's causal laws. That is, the coherence that supports inductive generalizations is a property of individual category members rather than categories. Moreover, we found that an exemplar's coherence was mediated by its degree of category membership. These results were obtained across a variety of causal network topologies and kinds of categories, including biological kinds, non-living natural kinds, and artifacts.
人类对象类别的一个重要属性是，它们定义了新观察到的属性会被推广到的示例集。我们操纵了与新类别相关的因果知识，并评估了由此产生的属性归纳强度。我们发现，特征间因果关系赋予类别的理论连贯性增强了归纳投射。然而，这种效应取决于具有待投射谓词的示例体现或满足其类别因果律的程度。也就是说，支持归纳概括的连贯性是单个类别成员而非类别的属性。此外，我们发现示例的连贯性是由其类别成员程度介导的。这些结果是在各种因果网络拓扑结构和类别类型中获得的，包括生物类别、非生物自然类别和人工制品。
