Smith L B
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 1981 Aug;7(4):811-24. doi: 10.1037//0096-1523.7.4.811.
Previous work has shown that adults and older children tend to classify multi-dimensional objects by identity on one dimension, whereas children under 8 years of age tend to classify these same objects by a relation of overall similarity. The present study investigated the hypothesis that this developmental trend is restricted to the classification of simple objects that differ only by limited amounts on a few dimensions. The specific hypothesis was that overall-similarity relations structure both adults' and children's classifications of heterogenous objects (objects that differ in a variety of ways). This hypothesis was suggested by the correspondence between the structure of young children's classifications and the structure of natural categories. The result of two experiments supported the hypothesis. When the to-be-classified objects varied simultaneously on relatively many dimensions, adults as well as children constructed classifications that maximized within-category similarity on all varying dimensions. The implications of these results for accounts of the perception of multidimensional relations and classificatory behavior are discussed.
先前的研究表明，成年人和年龄较大的儿童倾向于根据一个维度上的特征对多维度物体进行分类，而8岁以下的儿童则倾向于根据整体相似关系对这些相同的物体进行分类。本研究探讨了这样一种假设，即这种发展趋势仅限于对仅在几个维度上有有限差异的简单物体进行分类。具体假设是，整体相似关系构建了成年人和儿童对异质物体（在多种方面存在差异的物体）的分类。这一假设是由幼儿分类结构与自然类别结构之间的对应关系所提出的。两项实验的结果支持了这一假设。当待分类物体在相对较多的维度上同时变化时，成年人和儿童构建的分类都能使所有变化维度上的类别内相似性最大化。讨论了这些结果对多维关系感知和分类行为解释的意义。
