Abstract

Polymorphous concepts are hard to learn, and this is perhaps surprising because they, like many natural concepts, have an overall similarity structure. However, the dimensional summation hypothesis (Milton and Wills Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 30, 407–415 2004) predicts this difficulty. It also makes a number of other predictions about polymorphous concept formation, which are tested here. In Experiment 4, we confirm the theory’s prediction that polymorphous concept formation should be facilitated by deterministic pretraining on the constituent features of the stimulus. This facilitation is relative to an equivalent amount of training on the polymorphous concept itself. In further experiments, we compare the predictions of the dimensional summation hypothesis with a more general strategic account (Experiment 2), a seriality of training account (Experiment 3), a stimulus decomposition account (also Experiment 3), and an error-based account (Experiment 4). The dimensional summation hypothesis provides the best account of these data. In Experiment 5, a further prediction is confirmed—the single feature pretraining effect is eliminated by a concurrent counting task. The current experiments suggest the hypothesis that natural concepts might be acquired by the deliberate serial summation of evidence. This idea has testable implications for classroom learning.

中文翻译：

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多态类别学习的维数总和。

摘要

多态概念很难学习，这也许令人惊讶，因为它们像许多自然概念一样，具有整体相似性结构。但是，维数总和假说（Milton and Wills Journal of Experiment Psychology：学习，记忆和认知，30，407–415 2004）预测了这一困难。它还对多态概念的形成做出了许多其他预测，在此进行了测试。在实验 4中，我们证实了该理论的预测，即应该通过对刺激的组成特征进行确定性的预训练来促进多态概念的形成。这种促进相对于对多态概念本身的等效培训。在进一步的实验中，我们将维度总和假设的预测与更一般的策略帐户（实验 2），一系列培训帐户（实验 3），刺激分解帐户（也为实验 3）和基于错误的帐户进行比较（实验 4）。尺寸求和假设提供了这些数据的最佳解释。在实验 5中，进一步的预测得到确认-通过同时进行的计数任务消除了单个特征的预训练效果。当前的实验提出了这样的假设：自然的概念可以通过有意的循序渐进的证据求和而获得。这个想法对课堂学习具有可验证的意义。