This study investigated the development of rapid visual object categorization. N = 20 adults (Experiment 1), N = 21 five to six-year-old children (Experiment 2), and N = 140 four-, seven-, and eleven-month-old infants (Experiment 3; all predominantly White, 81 females, data collected in 2013-2020) participated in a fast periodic visual stimulation…

Effective category-based induction requires understanding that categories include both fundamental similarities between members and important variation. This article explores 4- to 11-year-olds' (n = 207) and adults' (n = 49) intuitions about this balance between within-category homogeneity and variability using a novel induction task in which…

Attention control abilities are relevant for learning success. Little is known about the development of audio-visual attention in early childhood. Four groups of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years and adults performed an audio-visual distraction paradigm (N = 106). Multilevel analyses revealed increased reaction times in a visual…

Two experiments examined infants' ability to form a spatial category when habituated to few (only 2) or many (6) exemplars of a spatial relation. Sixty-four infants of 10 months and 64 infants of 14 months were habituated to dynamic events in which a toy was placed in a consistent spatial relation ("in" or "on") to a referent…

Category-based induction requires selective use of different relations to guide inferences; this article examines the development of inferences based on ecological relations among living things. Three hundred and forty-six 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children from rural, suburban, and urban communities projected novel "diseases" or "insides" from one…

Neonates prefer human speech to other nonlinguistic auditory stimuli. However, it remains an open question whether there are any conceptual consequences of words on object categorization in infants younger than 6 months. The current study examined the influence of words and tones on object categorization in forty-six 3- to 4-month-old infants.…

How does understanding the decimal system change with age and experience? Second, third, sixth graders, and adults (Experiment 1: N = 96, mean ages = 7.9, 9.23, 12.06, and 19.96 years, respectively) made number line estimates across 3 scales (0-1,000, 0-10,000, and 0-100,000). Generation of linear estimates increased with age but decreased with…

Three experiments explored the significance of deontic properties (involving rights and obligations) in representations of social categories. Preschool-aged children (M = 4.8), young school-aged children (M = 8.2), and adults judged the centrality of behavioral, psychological, and deontic properties for both familiar (Experiments 1 and 2, Ns = 50…

When 60 five-year-old and 48 10-year-old children heard three stories, each containing three target objects from each of three taxonomic categories, younger children received greater benefit than older children from strongly scripted story presentations and from constrained category-cue and script-cue retrieval conditions. Cues and the extent to…

Examined the extent to which children draw upon reality and fantasy, either explicitly or implicitly, in their spontaneous classifications, and when instructed to sort on that basis. (Author/JMB)

Visual preference procedures were used to investigate development of perceptually based subordinate-level categorization in 3- to 7-month-old infants. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that 3- to 4-month-olds did not form category representations for photographic exemplars of subordinate-level classes of cats and dogs (i.e., Siamese vs. Tabby,…

Second graders, fifth graders, and adults participated in two experiments designed to study the effects of sorting on subsequent recall of unrelated words. (Author/CW)

Investigates the ability of four-, seven-, and ten-month-old infants to perceive and base novelty responses on correlations among perceptual attributes in a category-like context. In a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, ten-month-old infants clearly responded on the basis of the correlation among attributes, while four- and seven-month-old…

Three-, four-, five-, and 24-year-olds were exposed to continuum of new objects: category boundaries became less fuzzy with age; verbal justifications of category decisions were idiosyncratic or uninterpretable in youngest children, but by five years children referred to specific visual features; and fuzzy categories became less sensitive with age…

First and fifth graders sorted cards into two piles based on the orientation of a T figure. Sorting took place in the presence of irrelevant information which did or did not contrast in line slope with the target, or in the absence of irrelevant information. (Author/JMB)