Smith J David, Jackson Brooke N, Church Barbara A
Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, 738 Urban Life Building, 140 Decatur Street, Atlanta, GA, 30303, USA.
Language Research Center, Georgia State University, Decatur, GA, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2019 Apr;47(3):544-560. doi: 10.3758/s13421-018-0890-9.
Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been interested in humans' and animals' ability to respond to abstract relations, as this ability may underlie important capacities like analogical reasoning. Cross-species research has used relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which participants try to find stimulus pairs that "match" because they both express the same abstract relation (same or different). Researchers seek to understand the cognitive processes that underlie successful matching performance. In the present RMTS paradigm, the abstract-relational cue was made redundant with a first-order perceptual cue. Then the perceptual cue faded, requiring participants to transition from a perceptual to a conceptual approach by realizing the task's abstract-relational affordance. We studied participants' ability to make this transition with and without a working-memory load. The concurrent load caused participants to fail to break the perceptual-conceptual barrier unless the load was abandoned. We conclude that finding the conceptual solution depends on reconstruing the task using cognitive processes that are especially reliant on working memory. Our data provide the closest existing look at this cognitive reorganization. They raise important theoretical issues for cross-species comparisons of relational cognition, especially regarding animals' limitations in this domain.
认知心理学家、比较心理学家和发展心理学家长期以来一直对人类和动物对抽象关系做出反应的能力感兴趣，因为这种能力可能是类比推理等重要能力的基础。跨物种研究使用了关系匹配样本（RMTS）任务，在这些任务中，参与者试图找到因为都表达相同抽象关系（相同或不同）而“匹配”的刺激对。研究人员试图了解成功匹配表现背后的认知过程。在当前的RMTS范式中，抽象关系线索与一阶感知线索重复。然后感知线索逐渐消失，要求参与者通过认识到任务的抽象关系可供性，从感知方法过渡到概念方法。我们研究了参与者在有和没有工作记忆负荷的情况下进行这种过渡的能力。同时出现的负荷导致参与者无法打破感知 - 概念障碍，除非放弃负荷。我们得出结论，找到概念性解决方案取决于使用特别依赖工作记忆的认知过程来重新解释任务。我们的数据提供了对这种认知重组最接近的现有观察。它们为关系认知的跨物种比较提出了重要的理论问题，特别是关于动物在这一领域的局限性。
