Developmental Differences in Concept Acquisition Strategies

Task variations and attention shifts in young children’s category learning

“…There has been extensive investigation of how adults' categorisation is influenced by the method of category acquisition (e.g., Medin & Florian, 1992;Ward & Becker, 1992;Wattenmaker, 1991), but the present studies represent the first time this approach has been used with children. The question of whether young children are similarly sensitive to task variations is important because previous research has indicated that early childhood is characterised by poor flexibility of selective attention during category formation (Kemler Nelson, 1984;Kossan, 1981;Ward & Scott, 1987).…”

“…In a categorisation task for which such attributes were included, Kossan (1981) found the predicted developmental trend. In her investigation, 10-year-olds but not 7-yearolds discovered prototypical features within categories of fictitious animals for which members had salient individuating properties.…”

“…Consequently, it has been argued that young children are likely to exhibit either overly broad or overly narrow processing of instances that will seriously impede their discovery of prototypical features (Kemler, 1983;Kemler Nelson, 1984;Ward & Scott, 1987). Broad (i.e., nonselective) processing occurs when children distribute their attention widely across many features of instances (Kemler Nelson, 1984;Kossan, 1981). A strong version of this view holds that children perceive instances holistically, but nonselective processing could also take the form of distributed but analytic perception (Pacteau, Bonthoux, Perruchet, & Lautrey, 1994;Ward & Becker, 1992).…”

“…It has been argued this is to be expected whether or not children discover prototypical features. If they adopt nonselective processing then children could achieve accurate categorisation of novel instances based on their global resemblance to encoded exemplars (Kemler Nelson, 1984;Kossan, 1981). Alternatively, because such categories show a high level of feature overlap across instances, it is likely that children will categorise correctly even if they fixate on, and learn the category values for, just one or two feature dimensions (Ward & Scott, 1987).…”

Cognitive and Perceptual Limitations and Learning: An Excursion into Connectionist Theory

“…The holistic mode of perception, insofar as it directs attention to the whole visual array and not to its dimensions, enhances young children's ability to recognize and categorize objects. Third, Kossan [1981] showed that relying on the perception of overall similarity between objects, and not on the comparison of features, enhances the performance in categorization tasks involving ill-defined concepts, even of older children. He per formed an experiment in which second-and fifth-grade children were tested on differ ent types of category structures.…”