From Perceptual Categories to Concepts: What Develops?

People are remarkably smart: they use language, possess complex motor skills, make non-trivial inferences, develop and use scientific theories, make laws, and adapt to complex dynamic environments. Much of this knowledge requires concepts and this paper focuses on how people acquire concepts. It is argued that conceptual development progresses from simple perceptual grouping to highly abstract scientific concepts. This proposal of conceptual development has four parts. First, it is argued that categories in the world have different structure. Second, there might be different learning systems (sub-served by different brain mechanisms) that evolved to learn categories of differing structures. Third, these systems exhibit differential maturational course, which affects how categories of different structures are learned in the course of development. And finally, an interaction of these components may result in the developmental transition from perceptual groupings to more abstract concepts. This paper reviews a large body of empirical evidence supporting this proposal.

人类极其聪明：他们使用语言，拥有复杂的运动技能，进行非平凡的推理，发展和运用科学理论，制定法律，并适应复杂的动态环境。其中很多知识都需要概念，本文重点关注人类是如何获得概念的。有人认为，概念的发展从简单的感知分组发展到高度抽象的科学概念。这个关于概念发展的观点包含四个部分。首先，有人认为世界上的类别具有不同的结构。其次，可能存在不同的学习系统（由不同的大脑机制辅助），这些系统是为学习不同结构的类别而进化出来的。第三，这些系统呈现出不同的成熟过程，这影响了在发展过程中不同结构的类别是如何被学习的。最后，这些组成部分的相互作用可能导致从感知分组到更抽象概念的发展转变。本文回顾了大量支持这一观点的实证证据。