Eimas P D, Quinn P C, Cowan P
Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.
J Exp Child Psychol. 1994 Dec;58(3):418-31. doi: 10.1006/jecp.1994.1043.
The exclusivity of perceptually defined categorical representations for natural animal categories in young infants was investigated. Previously, as well as in Experiment 1, evidence was obtained for a categorical representation for cats in 3- and 4-month-old infants that excluded dogs but included perceptually similar female lions after a number of different familiarization procedures. However, in Experiment 2 both dogs and female lions were found to be excluded when the initial familiarization with cats alone was followed by six pairings of familiar cats and novel lions intermingled with two added pairings of familiar cats. The present results indicate that a categorical representation can attain a high level of exclusivity during early infancy as a consequence of experience with exemplars of the contrasting categories that accents the perceptual similarities among members of a category and the perceptual differences among exemplars from different categories.
研究了幼儿对自然动物类别的基于感知定义的类别表征的排他性。之前以及在实验1中，通过多种不同的熟悉程序，获得了证据表明3至4个月大的婴儿对猫有类别表征，该表征排除了狗，但包括了在感知上相似的母狮。然而，在实验2中，当仅对猫进行初始熟悉，随后将熟悉的猫与新奇的狮子进行六次配对，并穿插两次熟悉的猫的额外配对时，发现狗和母狮都被排除在外。目前的结果表明，由于接触到对比类别的范例，突出了同一类别成员之间的感知相似性以及不同类别范例之间的感知差异，类别表征在婴儿早期可以达到高度的排他性。
