Hochmann Jean-Rémy, Tuerk Arin S, Sanborn Sophia, Zhu Rebecca, Long Robert, Dempster Meg, Carey Susan
CNRS, UMR 5304, Institut des Sciences Cognitives - Marc Jeannerod, 67 Bd Pinel, 69675 Bron, France; Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Cogn Psychol. 2017 Dec;99:17-43. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.11.001. Epub 2017 Nov 10.
Five experiments compared preschool children's performance to that of adults and of non-human animals on match to sample tasks involving 2-item or 16-item arrays that varied according to their composition of same or different items (Array Match-to-Sample, AMTS). They establish that, like non-human animals in most studies, 3- and 4-year-olds fail 2-item AMTS (the classic relational match to sample task introduced into the literature by Premack, 1983), and that robust success is not observed until age 6. They also establish that 3-year-olds, like non-human animal species, succeed only when they are able to encode stimuli in terms of entropy, a property of an array (namely its internal variability), rather than relations among the individuals in the array (same vs. different), whereas adults solve both 2-item and 16-item AMTS on the basis of the relations same and different. As in the case of non-human animals, the acuity of 3- and 4-year-olds' representation of entropy is insufficient to solve the 2-item same-different AMTS task. At age 4, behavior begins to contrast with that of non-human species. On 16-item AMTS, a subgroup of 4-year-olds induce a categorical rule matching all-same arrays to all-same arrays, while matching other arrays (mixed arrays of same and different items) to all-different arrays. These children tend to justify their choices using the words "same" and "different." By age 4 a number of our participants succeed at 2-item AMTS, also justifying their choices by explicit verbal appeals using words for same and different. Taken together these results suggest that the recruitment of the relational representations corresponding to the meaning of these words contributes to the better performance over the preschool years at solving array match-to-sample tasks.
五项实验将学龄前儿童在涉及2项或16项阵列的样本匹配任务中的表现与成年人及非人类动物的表现进行了比较，这些阵列根据其相同或不同项目的组成而有所变化（阵列样本匹配，AMTS）。实验证实，与大多数研究中的非人类动物一样，3岁和4岁的儿童在2项AMTS任务（由普雷马克于1983年引入文献的经典关系样本匹配任务）中失败，直到6岁才会有显著成功。实验还证实，3岁儿童与非人类动物物种一样，只有在能够根据熵（阵列的一种属性，即其内部变异性）对刺激进行编码时才能成功，而不是根据阵列中个体之间的关系（相同与不同），而成年人则根据相同和不同的关系来解决2项和16项AMTS任务。与非人类动物的情况一样，3岁和4岁儿童对熵的表征敏锐度不足以解决2项相同-不同AMTS任务。4岁时，行为开始与非人类物种形成对比。在16项AMTS任务中，一组4岁儿童归纳出一条分类规则，将全相同阵列与全相同阵列匹配，而将其他阵列（相同和不同项目的混合阵列）与全不同阵列匹配。这些儿童倾向于用“相同”和“不同”来为自己的选择辩护。到4岁时，我们的一些参与者在2项AMTS任务中取得成功，也通过使用表示相同和不同的词语进行明确的语言诉求来为自己的选择辩护。综合这些结果表明，与这些词语含义相对应的关系表征的运用有助于学龄前儿童在解决阵列样本匹配任务中表现得更好。
