抄録
Two experiments were conducted to investigate the part-whole hierarchical organization of scene concepts. In each experiment, 16 subjects viewed a sentence “A is in B” and decided whether the scene A was a part of the scene B. The words used in Experiment 2 were less ambiguous than those used in Experiment 1. The ratio of correct responses and the reaction times from both of the experiments revealed that the part-whole hierarchy of scene concepts were different from concrete-abstract hierarchies of biological or object concepts in the following two respects. (1) The subjects' judgments did not necessarily follow a general principle of transitivity. That is, even if global-middle, and middle-local relationships were accepted, the relationship between global and local concepts was not always accepted, (2) The higher (more global) the level of concepts, the more fuzzy was the relationship between the concepts in hierarchy. These results were discussed in terms of the inherent concreteness of our knowledge about scenes.
