Department of Psychology, Hunter College, CUNY, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Canada.
Cognition. 2019 Aug;189:209-220. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.04.002. Epub 2019 Apr 16.
We naturally think and talk about the objects we encounter as instances of one or another kind of object (e.g. as a dog). This paper makes a proposal concerning the instance-of-object-kind representations that allow us to think of things as instances of object kinds and investigates two predictions of the proposed representations. Instance-of-object-kind representations represent an object as one of indefinitely many instances of a given object kind. In so doing, they implicate a uniqueness-in-kind constraint which represents an object as unique within a kind, by distinguishing the instance-of-object-kind representation of an object from instance-of-object-kind representations of other actually as well as potentially existing instances of that object kind. The uniqueness-in-kind constraint predicts that a given instance of an object kind cannot be transformed into a different potentially existing instance of the same kind, but allows the object to be transformed into a potentially existing instance of a different object kind. Instance-of-object-kind representations also implicate a mode-of-existence constraint whereby actually existing instances of an object kind are represented as being distinct from all actually existing instances of that kind and other object kinds. This constraint predicts that participants should reject the possibility of transforming an actually existing instance of an object kind into an actually existing instance of the same or different object kind. Five experiments provide evidence for these constraints. In so doing, the experiments provide evidence for the formal characteristics of the proposed instance-of-object-kind representations that guide our thinking about things as instances of object kinds.
我们自然而然地将遇到的对象视为某种类别的实例（例如，一只狗）。本文提出了一种关于对象类别实例的表示方法的建议，该方法允许我们将事物视为对象类别的实例，并研究了所提出的表示方法的两个预测。对象类别实例的表示方法将一个对象表示为给定对象类别的无限多个实例之一。这样做，它们暗示了一种独特性约束，即通过将对象的类别实例与同一对象类别的其他实际存在和潜在存在的实例的类别实例区分开来，将对象表示为在该类别内是独一无二的。独特性约束预测给定对象类别的给定实例不能转换为同一类别中的不同潜在存在的实例，但允许对象转换为不同对象类别的潜在存在的实例。对象类别实例的表示方法还暗示了一种存在模式约束，根据该约束，对象类别的实际存在的实例被表示为与该类别的所有实际存在的实例以及其他对象类别不同。该约束预测参与者应该拒绝将对象类别的实际存在的实例转换为同一或不同对象类别的实际存在的实例的可能性。五项实验为这些约束提供了证据。通过这样做，实验为所提出的对象类别实例的表示方法的形式特征提供了证据，这些特征指导我们将事物视为对象类别的实例。
