Effects of categorical labels on similarity judgments: A critical analysis of similarity-based approaches.

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to evaluate the claim that category labels affect children’s judgments of visual similarity. We presented preschool children with discriminable and identical sets of animal pictures and asked them to make perceptual judgments in the presence or absence of labels. Our findings indicate that children who are asked to make perceptual judgments about identical items judge discriminable items less accurately when making subsequent similarity judgments. Thus, labels do not generally affect children’s perceptual similarity judgments; rather, children’s reliance on labels to make similarity judgments appears to be attributable to flaws in the methodological approaches used in prior studies. These results have implications for the role of perceptual and conceptual information in children’s categorization and induction.

What the [beep]? Six-month-olds link novel communicative signals to meaning

“…Instead, infants’ performance varied as a function of the communicative context in which the tones were introduced. Thus, the current results underscore the inadequacy of appealing to signal familiarity alone to account for the facilitative effect of language on categorization (see also Althaus & Plunkett, 2015; Booth & Waxman, 2009; Ferry et al, 2013; Gliga, Volein, & Csibra, 2010; Noles & Gelman, 2012; Plunkett, 2008). …”

Development of inductive generalization with familiar categories

“…However, there is now overwhelming evidence that young children do not (and perhaps, cannot) ignore perceptual similarity when making inductive inferences (Badger & Shapiro, 2012;Sloutsky, Lo, & Fisher, 2001;Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004;Sloutsky, Kloos, & Fisher, 2007). Moreover, the conclusion that perceptual similarity makes a large contribution to children's inferences has now been confirmed even by those researchers who initially opposed this idea (Graham, Booth, & Waxman, 2012;Noles & Gelman, 2012;c.f. 2012b).…”

“…Richland et al (2006) suggested that ignoring perceptually compelling lures in favor of perceptually dissimilar category matches in higher-order reasoning tasks may be particularly challenging for young children in this age range. There is a great deal of evidence to support this assertion (Fisher 2011;Graham et al, 2012;Noles & Gelman, 2012;Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004;Sloutsky, et al, 2007).…”

Category structure affects the developmental trajectory of children's inductive inferences for both natural kinds and artefacts

“…If the child chose the perceptual distractor test item, this was coded as a perceptual choice; choosing the same-category test item was coded as a categorical choice. Due to ongoing debate as to the influence of labels on induction (see Noles & Gelman, 2012), no labels were used: Items were referred to as "this one". The task structure and hidden properties provided were the same for both the featural and relational conditions.…”

“…Specifically, if "insides" are assumed to be more important for natural kinds, and children as young as 3 years old can distinguish between properties of natural kinds and artefacts (see Gelman, 2003), then a stronger bias to focus on non-obvious category information should be observed for this domain. Although many studies have examined developmental changes in the way children view natural kinds and artefacts, there are few studies that include both types of stimuli in induction tasks, and the focus of the research was not to directly compare the two domains (e.g., Graham, Welder, Merrifield, & Berman, 2010;Noles & Gelman, 2012). Finally, none of these studies have looked at whether the developmental trajectory of inductive reasoning for natural kinds and artefacts is the same.…”