Smith L B
Child Dev. 1979 Sep;50(3):705-15.
This work is concerned with developmental changes in the structure of classifications. The central claim is that young children's undifferentiated perceptions of complex stimuli are highly structured by wholistic similarity whereas older children's perceptions are structured by component dimensions. It is shown in 2 experiments that young children systematically and spontaneously generalize a category if it is well organized by overall similarity but not if it is organized by a criterial dimension. Older children, on the other hand, spontaneously apprehend and extend a category by its dimensional structure. The third experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that criterial property categories are preferred in classification tasks requiring the explicit discovery of a general rule. It was found that younger children's attention to the dimensional relations within a category increases under rule-discovery instructions, although they still have difficulty ignoring wholistic similarity relations. The trend from similarity to dimensional classification is discussed in the context of Piagetian classification tasks and family-resemblance accounts of natural categories.
这项研究关注分类结构的发展变化。核心观点是，幼儿对复杂刺激的未分化感知由整体相似性高度构建，而大龄儿童的感知则由组成维度构建。两项实验表明，如果一个类别按整体相似性良好组织，幼儿会系统且自发地对其进行概括；但如果按标准维度组织，幼儿则不会。另一方面，大龄儿童会自发地根据类别维度结构理解并扩展该类别。第三个实验旨在检验一个假设，即在需要明确发现一般规则的分类任务中，标准属性类别更受青睐。研究发现，在规则发现指令下，幼儿对类别内维度关系的关注有所增加，尽管他们在忽略整体相似性关系方面仍有困难。本文在皮亚杰分类任务及自然类别的家族相似性理论背景下，讨论了从相似性分类到维度分类的发展趋势。
