Ahn W
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA.
Cognition. 1998 Dec;69(2):135-78. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(98)00063-8.
Ahn and Lassaline [Ahn, W., Lassaline, M.E., 1995. Causal structure in categorization. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Pittsburgh, PA, pp. 521-526] recently proposed a causal status hypothesis which states that features that play a causal role in a relational structure are more central than their effects. This hypothesis can account for previous research demonstrating that compositional features are generally important for natural kinds but functional features are generally important for artifacts. The causal status hypothesis explains this category-feature interaction effect in terms of differences in the causal status of compositional and functional features between natural kinds and artifacts. Experiments 1 and 2 examined real-life categories used in previous studies, and found positive correlations between the causal status of the features and their centrality across natural and artifactual kinds. Experiments 3 and 4 manipulated the causal status of compositional and functional features in artificial categories, and showed that it was causal status rather than the interaction between the type of feature and the type of category per se that accounted for feature centrality. The implications of these results on the distinctions between natural kinds and artifacts are discussed.
安和拉萨林（安，W.，拉萨林，M.E.，1995年。分类中的因果结构。认知科学协会第十七届年会论文集，宾夕法尼亚州匹兹堡，第521 - 526页）最近提出了一种因果地位假说，该假说认为在关系结构中起因果作用的特征比其结果更核心。这一假说可以解释先前的研究，这些研究表明构成特征通常对自然类别很重要，而功能特征通常对人工制品很重要。因果地位假说从自然类别和人工制品之间构成特征和功能特征的因果地位差异方面解释了这种类别 - 特征交互效应。实验1和实验2研究了先前研究中使用的现实生活类别，发现在自然类别和人工制品类别中，特征的因果地位与其核心性之间存在正相关。实验3和实验4操纵了人工类别中构成特征和功能特征的因果地位，并表明是因果地位而非特征类型与类别类型本身之间的相互作用决定了特征的核心性。本文讨论了这些结果对自然类别和人工制品之间区别的意义。
