D'Lauro Christopher, Tanaka James W, Curran Tim
Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0345, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2008 Jun;15(3):623-9. doi: 10.3758/pbr.15.3.623.
People usually categorize objects more quickly at the basic level (e.g., "dog") than at the subordinate (e.g., "collie") or superordinate (e.g., "animal") levels. Notable exceptions to this rule include objects of expertise, faces, or atypical objects (e.g., "penguin," "poodle"), all of which show faster than normal subordinate-level categorization. We hypothesize that the subordinate-level reaction time advantage for faces is influenced by their discriminability relative to other faces in the stimulus set. First, we replicated the subordinate-level advantage for faces (Experiment 1) and then showed that a basic-level advantage for faces can be elicited by increasing the perceptual similarity of the face stimuli, making discrimination more difficult (Experiment 2). Finally, we repeated both effects within subjects, showing that individual faces were slower to be categorized in the context of similar faces and more quickly categorized among diverse faces (Experiment 3).
人们通常在基本层次（例如“狗”）对物体进行分类的速度比在下属层次（例如“柯利牧羊犬”）或上级层次（例如“动物”）更快。这条规则的显著例外包括专业对象、面孔或非典型对象（例如“企鹅”“贵宾犬”），所有这些对象在下属层次的分类速度都比正常情况快。我们假设面孔在下属层次的反应时间优势受其与刺激集中其他面孔的可辨别性影响。首先，我们复制了面孔在下属层次的优势（实验1），然后表明通过增加面孔刺激的感知相似性，使辨别更加困难，可以引发面孔在基本层次的优势（实验2）。最后，我们在个体内部重复了这两种效应，表明在相似面孔的背景下，个体对面孔进行分类的速度较慢，而在不同面孔中分类速度更快（实验3）。
