Wasserman Edward A
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA.
Behav Processes. 2016 Feb;123:4-14. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2015.09.010. Epub 2015 Sep 28.
Keller and Schoenfeld (1950) proposed a unique behavioral perspective on conceptualization. They suggested that concepts refer solely to an organism's behavior and to the conditions under which it occurs; as such, conceptual behavior need be neither verbal nor uniquely human. Herrnstein and Loveland (1964) advanced that behavioral perspective by deploying an elegant training procedure to teach visual concepts to pigeons. Keller and Schoenfeld's perspective and Herrnstein and Loveland's methodology have inspired my own research into conceptualization by pigeons. Using a system of arbitrary visual tokens, my colleagues and I have built ever-expanding nonverbal "vocabularies" in pigeons through a variety of different concept learning tasks. Pigeons have reliably categorized as many as 2000 individual photographs from as many as 16 different human object categories, even without the benefit of seeing an item twice. Our formal model of conceptualization effectively embraces 25 years of empirical evidence as well as generates novel predictions for both pigeon and human conceptual behavior. Comparative study should continue to elucidate the commonalities and disparities between human and nonhuman conceptual behavior; it should also explicate the relationship between associative learning, object recognition, conceptualization, and language.
凯勒和舍恩菲尔德（1950年）提出了一种独特的关于概念形成的行为视角。他们认为概念仅指生物体的行为及其发生的条件；因此，概念行为既不一定是言语的，也并非人类所独有的。赫恩斯坦和洛夫兰德（1964年）通过采用一种巧妙的训练程序向鸽子教授视觉概念，推进了这一行为视角。凯勒和舍恩菲尔德的视角以及赫恩斯坦和洛夫兰德的方法激发了我对鸽子概念形成的研究。我和我的同事通过一系列不同的概念学习任务，利用一个任意视觉符号系统，在鸽子身上构建了不断扩展的非语言“词汇表”。鸽子能够可靠地对来自多达16种不同人类物体类别的2000张个体照片进行分类，甚至无需两次看到同一物品。我们的概念形成形式模型有效地涵盖了25年的实证证据，并对鸽子和人类的概念行为都做出了新的预测。比较研究应继续阐明人类和非人类概念行为之间的共性和差异；它还应阐明联想学习、物体识别、概念形成和语言之间的关系。
