Rehder Bob
Department of Psychology, New York University, NY 10003, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2006 Jan;34(1):3-16. doi: 10.3758/bf03193382.
Five experiments were performed to investigate the category-based generalization of nonblank properties, properties that were novel but that were attributed to existing category features with causal explanations. Experiments 1-3 tested how such explanations interact with the well-known effects of similarity on such generalizations. The results showed that when the causal explanations were used, standard effects of typicality (Experiment 1), diversity (Experiment 2), or similarity itself (Experiment 3) were almost completely eliminated. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that category-based generalizations exhibit some of the standard properties of causal reasoning; for example, an effect (i.e., a novel category property) is judged to be more prevalent when its cause (i.e., an existing category feature) is also prevalent. These findings suggest that category-based property generalization is often an instance of causal inference.
进行了五项实验来研究非空白属性的基于类别的泛化，这些属性是新颖的，但通过因果解释归因于现有的类别特征。实验1至3测试了此类解释如何与相似性对这种泛化的众所周知的影响相互作用。结果表明，当使用因果解释时，典型性（实验1）、多样性（实验2）或相似性本身（实验3）的标准效应几乎完全消除。实验4和5表明，基于类别的泛化表现出因果推理的一些标准属性；例如，当一个效应（即一种新颖的类别属性）的原因（即一个现有的类别特征）也很普遍时，该效应被判断为更普遍。这些发现表明，基于类别的属性泛化通常是因果推理的一个实例。
