Minda John Paul, Desroches Amy S, Church Barbara A
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, Social Science Centre, London, Ontario, Canada.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2008 Nov;34(6):1518-33. doi: 10.1037/a0013355.
Three experiments investigated the ability of 3-, 5-, and 8-year-old children as well as adults to learn sets of perceptual categories. Adults and children performed comparably on categories that could be learned by either a single-dimensional rule or by associative learning mechanisms. However, children showed poorer performance relative to adults in learning categories defined by a disjunctive rule and categories that were nonlinearly separable. Increasing the task demands for adults resulted in child-like performance on the disjunctive categories. Decreasing the task demands for children resulted in more adult-like performance on the disjunctive categories. The authors interpret these results within a multiple-systems approach to category learning and suggest that children have not fully developed the same explicit category learning system as adults.
三项实验研究了3岁、5岁、8岁儿童以及成年人学习感知类别集的能力。在可以通过单维规则或联想学习机制学习的类别上，成年人和儿童的表现相当。然而，在学习由析取规则定义的类别和非线性可分的类别时，儿童相对于成年人表现较差。增加成年人的任务要求会导致在析取类别上出现类似儿童的表现。降低儿童的任务要求会导致在析取类别上出现更类似成年人的表现。作者在类别学习的多系统方法框架内解释了这些结果，并表明儿童尚未完全发育出与成年人相同的显性类别学习系统。
