カテゴリー分類における知識利用と熟達の程度が楽曲の再認にあたえる影響

抄録

In some cases, intermediate learners perform tasks worse than novices. For example, those who drink wine frequently but yet only have their limited expert (verbal) knowledge about it fail to recognize wine they drunk after they verbalized its taste using technical terms (Melcher & Schooler, 1996). It seems that the verbalization of insufficient perceptual knowledge does not always help intermediates to perform the recognition tasks. However, it is unclear whether the negative effect is caused by verbalization itself or by the cognitive load with the verbalization. The present experiment examined the question by minimalizing the verbalization, i.e., making participants do categorical classification in one technical term. Using music as a material, the present experiment examined what effects the categorical classification in a technical term would make on perceptual memory performance as a function of the acquisition of the expert skills. Twenty novices and twenty intermediates in classical music participated in the experiment. The intermediates were junior members of an amateur orchestra but had little knowledge of music history. Half of each group listened to piano pieces and classified each into one of three musicological categories: baroque, classical, and romantic. The rest listened to the pieces and performed another task as filler. Then, all of them took a recognition test of the pieces. As a result, when doing the classification in technical terms, the novices could recognize the pieces significantly more successfully than the intermediates. The categorical classification in technical terms tended to improve the perceptual memory performance by the novices but had not any effects on that by the intermediates. The findings suggest that verbalization itself affects the intermediates' performances.