Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University.
Psychol Sci. 2022 Jun;33(6):999-1019. doi: 10.1177/09567976211061470. Epub 2022 May 26.
Our knowledge of the world is populated with categories such as dogs, cups, and chairs. Such categories shape how we perceive, remember, and reason about their members. Much of our exposure to the entities we come to categorize occurs incidentally as we experience and interact with them in our everyday lives, with limited access to explicit teaching. This research investigated whether incidental exposure contributes to building category knowledge by rendering people "ready to learn"-allowing them to rapidly capitalize on brief access to explicit teaching. Across five experiments ( = 438 adults), we found that incidental exposure did produce a ready-to-learn effect, even when learners showed no evidence of robust category learning during exposure. Importantly, this readiness to learn occurred only when categories possessed a rich structure in which many features were correlated within categories. These findings offer a window into how our everyday experiences may contribute to building category knowledge.
我们对世界的认识是由狗、杯子和椅子等类别构成的。这些类别影响着我们对它们成员的感知、记忆和推理方式。我们对要进行分类的实体的大部分接触都是偶然发生的，因为我们在日常生活中体验和与之互动，只能有限地接触到明确的教学。这项研究调查了偶然接触是否有助于建立类别知识，使人们“准备好学习”——让他们能够迅速利用简短的明确教学。在五项实验中（= 438 名成年人），我们发现偶然接触确实产生了“准备好学习”的效果，即使学习者在接触过程中没有表现出强大的类别学习的证据。重要的是，这种学习的准备状态仅在类别具有丰富的结构时才会发生，其中许多特征在类别内是相关的。这些发现为我们了解日常经验如何有助于构建类别知识提供了一个窗口。
