The current study examines 3- and 5-year-olds' representation of the concept we label "animal" and its two nested concepts--"animal"[subscript contrastive] (including only non-human animals) and "animal"[subscript inclusive] (including both humans and non-human animals). Building upon evidence that naming promotes object categorization, we…

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure,…

Evaluating whether a limited sample of evidence provides a good basis for induction is a critical cognitive task. We hypothesized that whereas adults evaluate the inductive strength of samples containing multiple pieces of evidence by attending to the relations among the exemplars (e.g., sample diversity), six-year-olds would attend to the degree…

This study was aimed at revealing which cognitive processes are lateralized in visual categorizations of "humans" by pigeons. To this end, pigeons were trained to categorize pictures of humans and then tested binocularly or monocularly (left or right eye) on the learned categorization and for transfer to novel exemplars (Experiment 1). Subsequent…

A number of recent models and experiments have suggested that evidence of early category-based induction is an artifact of perceptual cues provided by experimenters. We tested these accounts against the prediction that different relations (causal versus non-causal) determine the types of perceptual similarity by which children generalize. Young…

Cross-cultural comparisons of categorization often confound cultural factors with expertise. This paper reports four experiments on the conceptual behavior of Native American and majority-culture fish experts. The two groups live in the same general area and engage in essentially the same set of fishing-related behaviors. Nonetheless, cultural…