Quinn P C, Eimas P D, Rosenkrantz S L
Department of Psychology, Washington and Jefferson College, Washington, PA 15301.
Perception. 1993;22(4):463-75. doi: 10.1068/p220463.
The paired-preference procedure was used in a series of experiments to explore the abilities of infants aged 3 and 4 months to categorize photographic exemplars from natural (adult-defined) basic-level categories. The question of whether the categorical representations that were evidenced excluded members of a related, perceptually similar category was also investigated. Experiments 1-3 revealed that infants could form categorical representations for dogs and cats that excluded birds. Experiment 4 showed that the representation for cats also excluded dogs, but that the representation for dogs did not exclude cats. However, a supplementary experiment showed that the representation for dogs did exclude cats when the variability of the dog exemplars was reduced to match that of the cat exemplars. The results are discussed in terms of abilities necessary for the formation of more complex categorical representations.
在一系列实验中采用了配对偏好程序，以探究3个月和4个月大的婴儿对来自自然（成人定义的）基本层次类别的照片样本进行分类的能力。研究人员还探讨了所证明的分类表征是否排除了相关的、在感知上相似的类别成员这一问题。实验1至3表明，婴儿能够形成排除鸟类的狗和猫的分类表征。实验4表明，猫的表征也排除了狗，但狗的表征并未排除猫。然而，一项补充实验表明，当狗样本的变异性降低到与猫样本相匹配时，狗的表征确实排除了猫。我们从形成更复杂分类表征所需的能力方面对这些结果进行了讨论。
