New York University
New York University.
Psychol Sci. 2014 Sep;25(9):1816-21. doi: 10.1177/0956797614535401. Epub 2014 Jul 11.
The ability to represent knowledge at the category level promotes the transfer of learning. How this ability integrates with basic forms of conditioned learning is unknown but could explain why conditioned fear is overgeneralized after aversive experiences. We examined the impact of stimulus typicality--an important determinant of category-based induction--on fear learning and generalization. Typicality is known to affect the strength of categorical arguments; a premise involving typical exemplars (e.g., sparrow) is believed to apply to other members, whereas a premise about atypical exemplars (e.g., penguin) generalizes more narrowly to similar items. We adopted this framework to human fear conditioning and found that fear conditioned to typical exemplars generalized more readily to atypical members than vice versa, despite equal feature overlap across conditions. These findings have implications for understanding why some fearful events lead to broad overgeneralization of fear whereas others are regarded as isolated episodes.
类别水平的知识表示能力促进了学习的迁移。这种能力如何与基本形式的条件学习相结合尚不清楚，但可以解释为什么在经历了不愉快的经历后，条件性恐惧会过度泛化。我们研究了刺激典型性（类别归纳的一个重要决定因素）对恐惧学习和泛化的影响。典型性已知会影响类别推理的强度；一个涉及典型范例（例如，麻雀）的前提被认为适用于其他成员，而一个关于非典型范例（例如，企鹅）的前提则更狭义地泛化到类似的项目。我们采用这个框架进行人类恐惧条件作用，发现与典型范例相关的恐惧比与之相反的情况更容易泛化到非典型范例，尽管在各个条件下的特征重叠度相同。这些发现对于理解为什么有些令人恐惧的事件会导致恐惧的广泛过度泛化，而其他事件则被视为孤立事件具有重要意义。
