Johns Hopkins University, 21218, Baltimore, Maryland.
Mem Cognit. 1978 Sep;6(5):481-90. doi: 10.3758/BF03198235.
An important aspect of the categorization process is that an item can be assigned membership in more than one semantic category. Previous work examining how subjects decide an item's membership in one of several alternative categories has most often used categories having a strict hierarchical relationship (e.g., bird-canary). Four experiments are reported that examine how subjects decide membership of simple pictorial stimuli in partially overlapping categories (e.g., high and very high). Experiment 1 was a rating task designed to identify items as members, nonmembers, or as falling on the fringes for several overlapping categories. In Experiments 2-4, this information was used to predict subjects' mean reaction time in speeded categorization tasks using the same pictorial stimuli. Subjects interpreted the categories in one of two very different ways. According to the first interpretation, there was a strict set-subset relationship between categories such as "high" and "very high." According to the second, the entailment relationship did not hold; membership in the category "very high" did not imply membership in "high." Even when subjects used a set-subset interpretation of the category labels, their reaction times were affected by a form of semantic response competition. Subjects took longer to verify an item's membership in a category when there was another more appropriate category descriptor for that item included in the experiment.
分类过程的一个重要方面是，一个项目可以被分配到多个语义类别中。之前的研究大多使用具有严格层次关系的类别（例如，鸟-金丝雀）来检查受试者如何决定一个项目在几个替代类别中的成员身份。本文报告了四项实验，检验了受试者如何决定部分重叠类别的简单图像刺激的成员身份（例如，高和非常高）。实验 1 是一项评分任务，旨在确定几个重叠类别的成员、非成员或边界项。在实验 2-4 中，使用相同的图像刺激，根据这些信息来预测受试者在快速分类任务中的平均反应时间。受试者以两种非常不同的方式解释类别。根据第一种解释，类别（如“高”和“非常高”）之间存在严格的集合-子集关系。根据第二种解释，蕴涵关系不成立；“非常高”类别的成员资格并不意味着“高”类别的成员资格。即使受试者对类别标签的解释是基于集合-子集的，他们的反应时间也会受到语义反应竞争的影响。当实验中包含另一个更合适的项目类别描述符时，受试者需要更长的时间来验证项目在类别中的成员身份。
