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，学习德国牧羊犬，金毛寻回犬和吉娃娃是狗），人们获得的知识可以转移到新的实例和情况中。与此同时，人们也发展了他们所分类的事物的心理表征。这个研究项目的目标是扩展我们对言语和知觉知识在分类过程中发展的理解，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言语规则来分类人工刺激。例如，参与者可能会被告知将“蓝色和矩形”对象放在一个类别中，将“红色和曲线”对象放在另一个类别中。要回答的问题将包括：什么是长期的学习对人们的能力，学习不同的功能（颜色，形状等），使刺激在分类过程中的影响？语言规则没有规定的特征必须有多显著才能被学习？语言规则没有规定的特征，要想被学习，对类别成员资格的预测性必须有多大？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？最终，回答这些问题的兴趣在于，它们将有助于建立分类范式与认知心理学中其他生产范式之间的联系，并将分类文献嵌入到更大的学习和记忆理论框架中。

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.