Department of Psychology, City University, Northampton Square, London, England.
Mem Cognit. 2009 Dec;37(8):1150-63. doi: 10.3758/MC.37.8.1150.
Two experiments measured the joint influence of three key sets of semantic features on the frequency with which artifacts (Experiment 1) or plants and creatures (Experiment 2) were categorized in familiar categories. For artifacts, current function outweighed both originally intended function and current appearance. For biological kinds, appearance and behavior, an inner biological function, and appearance and behavior of offspring all had similarly strong effects on categorization. The data were analyzed to determine whether an independent cue model or an interactive model best accounted for how the effects of the three feature sets combined. Feature integration was found to be additive for artifacts but interactive for biological kinds. In keeping with this, membership in contrasting artifact categories tended to be superadditive, indicating overlapping categories, whereas for biological kinds, it was subadditive, indicating conceptual gaps between categories. It is argued that the results underline a key domain difference between artifact and biological concepts.
两项实验测量了三组关键语义特征对人工制品（实验 1）或植物和生物（实验 2）在熟悉类别中分类频率的共同影响。对于人工制品，当前功能超过了原本预期的功能和当前外观。对于生物种类，外观和行为、内在生物功能、后代的外观和行为都对分类产生了类似的强烈影响。对数据进行了分析，以确定独立线索模型或交互模型最能解释这三组特征集的影响是如何结合的。对于人工制品，特征整合是加性的，而对于生物种类，特征整合是交互的。这与以下事实一致，即对比人工制品类别的成员往往是超加性的，表明存在重叠的类别，而对于生物种类，成员是次加性的，表明类别之间存在概念上的差距。研究结果表明，这突显了人工制品和生物概念之间的一个关键领域差异。
