動物の概念形成をめぐる記憶の問題(記憶をめぐって,フォーラム)

抄録

This article briefly reviews the issues of memory processing for concept formation in animals. The range of topics has included organization and active processing in animal memory, abstract concepts, categorization, functional equivalence, and abstraction of prototypes. Animal concept studies have revealed that abstract concepts and exemplar specific rules are not mutually exclusive. With artificial categories constructed to mimic the essential nature of natural categories, my colleagues and I have found that discrimination training with only few exemplars enabled pigeons to abstract prototypes and that the discrimination transferred to novel exemplars including perceptually disparate stimuli. Our findings suggest that exemplar learning taking place at a very basic stage of memory processing enables organisms to learn visual concepts characterized by categorical coherence or the so-called "family resemblance among the members".