Krascum R M, Andrews S
Department of Psychology, University of Wales Swansea, United Kingdom.
Child Dev. 1998 Apr;69(2):333-46.
Two experiments examined whether 4- to 5-year-olds' acquisition of family-resemblance categories (for fictitious animals) was benefited by giving them a theory that explained the behaviors of category members ("fighter" versus "hider") in terms of the relations between functional surface features. As gauged by immediate and 24-hour-delayed categorization tests, children who performed theory-guided learning were more successful at making feature/category associations than those who performed similarity-guided learning. The Theory group categorized individual attributes significantly better than children for whom features of the training examples were identified simply by pointing and naming (Features condition, Experiment 1) or who were taught unrelated functions for features such that they could not be united within any obvious causal schema (Features Description condition, Experiment 2). These results support claims that mere similarity is insufficient to support category acquisition (Murphy & Medin, 1985) and show that theories giving an explanation for the existence of correlated properties can assist children to learn the distribution of perceptual attributes across categories.
两项实验探究了，对于4到5岁的儿童而言，给予他们一种理论，来解释虚构动物的家族相似性类别（“战斗者”与“隐藏者”）成员的行为是如何基于功能性表面特征之间的关系，这是否有助于他们对这些类别的习得。通过即时分类测试和24小时延迟分类测试来衡量，进行理论引导学习的儿童在建立特征/类别关联方面比进行相似性引导学习的儿童更成功。理论组在对个体属性进行分类方面明显优于其他儿童，这些儿童要么是通过简单的指向和命名来识别训练示例的特征（实验1的特征条件），要么是被教授了与特征无关的功能，以至于这些特征无法在任何明显的因果模式中统一起来（实验2的特征描述条件）。这些结果支持了这样的观点，即仅仅依靠相似性不足以支持类别习得（墨菲和梅丁，1985），并表明能够对相关属性的存在给出解释的理论可以帮助儿童了解感知属性在不同类别中的分布情况。
