ABSTRACT

In the past two decades, human categorisation research has achieved significant progress via the rigorous and systematic study of concepts in terms of category structures and their families. The importance of these structure families stems from evidence suggesting that learning and categorisation performance are not only limited by low- and high-level generalisation mechanisms but by the inherent nature of the environmental and mental stimuli entertained by observers during the concept learning process. In this paper, we propose a new direction for concept learning and categorisation research based on several dual paradigmatic tensions that hinge on the inherent nature of the components of stimuli, limitations of the innate abilities of the observer to process such components, and the relationship between the two. The tensions range from the various possible properties and constraints of the dimensions underlying categories of object stimuli to various notions of supervised learning capable of significantly altering concept learnability. The substantial extant literature on concept learning research indicates that rigorous empirical investigations targeting these tensions are either non-existent or, at best, severely lacking despite their ecological significance. We shall argue that future theory building about concept learning should attempt to resolve these tensions and that without the proper empirical and theoretical focus on them, concept learning research will fail to achieve its ultimate goals anytime soon.

摘要

在过去的二十年里，通过对范畴结构及其家族的概念进行严格而系统的研究，人类分类研究取得了重大进展。这些结构族的重要性源于证据表明学习和分类性能不仅受到低级和高级泛化机制的限制，而且还受到观察者在概念学习过程中所接受的环境和心理刺激的固有性质的限制。在本文中，我们基于几个双重范式张力提出了概念学习和分类研究的新方向，这些双重范式张力取决于刺激成分的固有性质、观察者处理这些成分的先天能力的局限性，以及它们之间的关系。他们俩。张力的范围从对象刺激类别的各种可能属性和维度的约束到能够显着改变概念可学习性的各种监督学习概念。关于概念学习研究的大量现有文献表明，针对这些紧张局势的严格实证调查要么不存在，要么尽管具有生态意义，但充其量是严重缺乏。我们将争辩说，关于概念学习的未来理论构建应该试图解决这些紧张关系，如果没有对它们进行适当的经验和理论关注，概念学习研究将无法很快实现其最终目标。