Smith J David, Chapman William P, Redford Joshua S
Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process. 2010 Jan;36(1):39-53. doi: 10.1037/a0016573.
Smith and Minda (1998) and Blair and Homa (2001) studied the time course of category learning in humans. They distinguished an early, abstraction-based stage of category learning from a later stage that incorporated a capacity for categorizing exceptional category members. The present authors asked whether similar processing stages characterize the category learning of nonhuman primates. Humans (Homo sapiens) and monkeys (Macaca mulatta) participated in category-learning tasks that extended Blair and Homa's paradigm comparatively. Early in learning, both species improved on typical items more than on exception items, indicating an initial mastery of the categories' general structure. Later in learning, both species selectively improved their exception-item performance, indicating exception-item resolution or exemplar memorization. An initial stage of abstraction-based category learning may characterize categorization across a substantial range of the order Primates. This default strategy may have an adaptive resonance with the family resemblance organization of many natural-kind categories.
史密斯和明达（1998年）以及布莱尔和霍马（2001年）研究了人类类别学习的时间进程。他们区分了类别学习的早期基于抽象的阶段和后期阶段，后期阶段包含对异常类别成员进行分类的能力。本文作者探讨了类似的处理阶段是否也表征了非人类灵长类动物的类别学习。人类（智人）和猴子（猕猴）参与了类别学习任务，这些任务相对扩展了布莱尔和霍马的范式。在学习早期，两个物种在典型项目上的表现比在异常项目上的表现提升得更多，这表明它们初步掌握了类别的一般结构。在学习后期，两个物种都选择性地提高了它们在异常项目上的表现，这表明它们解决了异常项目或记住了范例。基于抽象的类别学习的初始阶段可能表征了灵长目动物广泛范围内的分类。这种默认策略可能与许多自然类别家族相似性组织具有适应性共鸣。
