Vigo Ronaldo, Evans Steven W, Owens Julie Sarno
a Psychology Department , Ohio University , Athens , OH , USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2015;68(6):1058-72. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2014.974625. Epub 2014 Nov 18.
Although significant progress has been made with respect to our understanding of categorization and concept learning behaviour in adults, much less is known about how this key capacity plays out with respect to more restrictive populations. This is unfortunate because much may be revealed about the nature of concept learning by examining the limits exhibited by special populations. With this tenet in mind, in what follows, we investigated key aspects of concept learning in terms of the unexplored comparative performance of three populations-adults, adolescents, and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). To do so, we employed a novel parainformative experimental task involving categorical stimuli with four objects defined over three dimensions. The learning difficulty ordering for these types of three-dimensional stimuli has proven robust and has been replicated by several researchers. Indeed, in our experiment, we observed the same concept learning ordering in adults and adolescents, but not in ADHD adolescents: For example, the latter group showed greatly impaired categorization performance on stimuli characterized by an "exclusive-or" rule. However, categorization performance on such type of stimuli indicated good reliability in discriminating between adolescents with and without ADHD (receiver-operating characteristic, ROC = .82). We accurately predicted and accounted for these results using generalized invariance structure theory (GIST; Vigo, 2013. The GIST of concepts. Cognition, 129, 138-162), which posits that organisms detect invariance patterns in stimuli that are necessary precursors to concept formation.
尽管在理解成年人的分类和概念学习行为方面已经取得了显著进展，但对于这种关键能力在更具局限性的人群中是如何表现的，我们所知甚少。这很遗憾，因为通过研究特殊人群所表现出的局限性，可能会揭示出很多关于概念学习本质的信息。基于这一原则，在接下来的内容中，我们从成年人、青少年以及患有注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）的青少年这三类人群未被探索的比较表现方面，研究了概念学习的关键方面。为此，我们采用了一项新颖的半信息性实验任务，该任务涉及具有三个维度且由四个物体定义的分类刺激。这类三维刺激的学习难度排序已被证明是稳定的，并且被几位研究人员重复验证过。事实上，在我们的实验中，我们在成年人和青少年中观察到了相同的概念学习排序，但在患有ADHD的青少年中却没有：例如，后一组在以“异或”规则为特征的刺激上表现出分类能力大幅受损。然而，这类刺激的分类表现表明，在区分患有和未患有ADHD的青少年方面具有良好的可靠性（接受者操作特征曲线，ROC = 0.82）。我们使用广义不变性结构理论（GIST；维戈，2013年。概念的GIST。认知，129，138 - 162）准确地预测并解释了这些结果，该理论假定生物体能够检测刺激中的不变性模式，而这些模式是概念形成的必要前提。
