Bhatt Ramesh S, Wilk Amy, Hill Debra, Rovee-Collier Carolyn
Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0044, USA.
Dev Psychobiol. 2004 Mar;44(2):103-15. doi: 10.1002/dev.10164.
In two experiments with 36 human infants, we asked whether 3- and 6-month-olds could use correlations between attributes of individual objects to categorize. Infants learned to kick to move block mobiles that simultaneously displayed two categories defined by the figures displayed on them: the colors of the figures and the colors of the blocks. Two features were correlated, and the third varied across categories. Only 6-month-olds categorized novel category exemplars that preserved the original feature correlations (Experiment 1A), but both 3- and 6-month-olds discriminated feature recombinations that broke the original correlations (Experiment 1B). When category exemplars were presented successively, 6-month-olds also learned the feature correlations and used them to categorize (Experiment 2), but their performance was less robust. Infants' superior learning when stimuli were presented simultaneously may reflect "unitization," a learning disposition unique to immature infants. These experiments reveal that infants' ability to use correlated attributes to categorize emerges months earlier than previously thought.
在针对36名人类婴儿的两项实验中，我们探究了3个月和6个月大的婴儿是否能够利用单个物体的属性之间的相关性进行分类。婴儿学会踢动以移动积木挂件，这些挂件同时展示了由其上所展示的图形定义的两类：图形的颜色和积木的颜色。其中两个特征是相关的，而第三个特征在不同类别中有所变化。只有6个月大的婴儿能够对保留原始特征相关性的新类别范例进行分类（实验1A），但3个月和6个月大的婴儿都能区分打破原始相关性的特征重组（实验1B）。当类别范例相继呈现时，6个月大的婴儿也学会了特征相关性并利用它们进行分类（实验2），但其表现不够稳健。当刺激同时呈现时婴儿表现出的卓越学习能力可能反映了“单元化”，这是未成熟婴儿特有的一种学习倾向。这些实验表明，婴儿利用相关属性进行分类的能力比之前认为的要早出现几个月。
