Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2011 Jun;119(3):438-47. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.02.008. Epub 2011 Mar 5.
How does variability between members of a category influence infants' category learning? We explore the impact of the order in which different items are sampled on category formation. Two groups of 10-months-olds were presented with a series of exemplars to be organized into a single category. In a low distance group, the order of presentation minimized the perceptual distance between consecutive exemplars. In a high distance group, the order of presentation maximized the distance between successive exemplars. At test, only infants in the High Distance condition reliably discriminated between the category prototype and an atypical exemplar. Hence, the order in which infants learnt about the exemplars impacted their categorization performance. Our findings demonstrate the importance of moment-to-moment variations in similarity during infants' category learning.
类别成员之间的可变性如何影响婴儿的类别学习？我们探讨了不同项目被采样的顺序对类别形成的影响。两组 10 个月大的婴儿被呈现一系列示例，这些示例要被组织成一个单一的类别。在低距离组中，呈现的顺序使连续示例之间的感知距离最小化。在高距离组中，呈现的顺序使连续示例之间的距离最大化。在测试中，只有在高距离条件下的婴儿才能可靠地区分类别原型和非典型示例。因此，婴儿学习示例的顺序影响了他们的分类表现。我们的发现表明，在婴儿的类别学习过程中，相似性的瞬间变化非常重要。
