The impact of categorization task demands on the development of verbal and perceptual knowledge

当学习将一组实例与给定类别相关联时(例如，了解到德国牧羊犬、金毛猎犬和吉娃娃是狗)，人们获得的知识随后可以转移到新的实例和情况中。同时，人们也会对他们所分类的事物形成心理表征。这个研究项目的目标将是扩大我们对分类过程中语言和知觉知识发展的理解。我将使用的主要实验室分类任务包括给参与者一个简单的语言规则来对人工刺激进行分类。例如，参与者可能被告知将“蓝色和矩形”对象归入一类，而将“红色和曲线”对象归入另一类。要回答的问题包括：长期学习对人们学习分类过程中构成刺激的不同特征(颜色、形状等)的能力有什么影响？语言规则没有指定的特征必须有多显著才能被学习？为了被学习，没有被语言规则指定的特征必须如何预测类别成员资格？外显的言语知识和内隐的知觉知识在多大程度上驱动类别决策？使用不完善的语言规则对学习有什么影响？归根结底，回答这些问题的兴趣在于，它们将有助于在范畴化范式和认知心理学中的其他产出性范式之间建立联系，并将范畴化文献嵌入到关于学习和记忆的更大的理论框架中。

When learning to associate a set of instances to a given category (for example, learning that German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers, and Chihuahuas are dogs), people acquire knowledge that can then be transferred to novel instances and situations. Simultaneously, people also develop mental representations of the things that they categorize. The goal of this program of research will be to extend our understanding of the development of verbal and perceptual knowledge as it unfolds during the categorization process.The main laboratory categorization task that I will use involves giving participants a simple verbal rule to categorize artificial stimuli. For example, participants might be told to put "blue and rectangular" objects in one category and "red and curvilinear" objects in another. The questions to be answered will include: What is the impact of prolonged learning on people's ability to learn the different features (color, shape, etc) that make up stimuli during the categorization process? How salient must features not specified by the verbal rule be in order to be learned? How predictive of category membership must features not specified by the verbal rule be in order to be learned? To what extent do explicit verbal knowledge and implicit perceptual knowledge drive category decisions? What is the impact of using imperfect verbal rules on learning?Ultimately, the interest of answering these questions is that they will help establish a link between categorization paradigms and other productive paradigms in cognitive psychology, as well as embed the categorization literature in a larger theoretical framework on learning and memory.