The heterogeneity among children with learning disabilities still represents a barrier and a challenge in their conceptualization. Although a dimensional approach has been gaining support, the categorical approach is still the most adopted, as in the recent fifth edition of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." The…

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to…

Studies of concept formation in infancy have demonstrated that certain experimental settings can elicit spontaneous behavior from infants which has been called "sorting" or "object grouping". This study pursues the issue of early sorting with infants as young as 6 months, and with a broader range of stimuli than has been used…

To investigate how a child organizes new objects and how categories function for a chid, twelve 6- and twelve 8-year-olds were individually given several sorting tasks involving 21 three-dimensional nonsense objects. The child was exposed to all the objects; three objects were pointed out and withdrawn; and then the child was asked to describe…

Study concerned with the effects of procedural differences on the classification of geometrical stimuli. (Author)

The development of multiplicative classificatory skills in children between 4 and 9 years of age was investigated by means of two forms of the matrix-completion task. (Authors)

Results of three investigations of the development of word definitions indicated that younger childrens' definitions, including use or lack of use of superordinate categorical terms, fell short of adult informativeness, while, by age 10, children generally met such criteria in their definitions. (Author/CB)

Investigated developmental trends in organization and free recall as they interact with spatial representation and blocking. Subjects were 695 children in grades 4, 6 and 8. Task factors appeared to interact with developmental trends in both organization and free recall. (GO)

The most significant finding is that classification according to complete similarity not only occurs much earlier than reported by Inhelder and Piaget, but also does not follow the developmental course reported by Inhelder and Piaget. (Author)

Investigated the development and fragmentation of categories over chronological and mental age without the requisite of free recall. Kindergarten, fourth grade, ninth grade and retarded students labeled and categorized chromatic slides of picturable objects. (GO)

A grouping task revealed a chronological progression: color and form determined the 4-year-old children's grouping about equally; form dominated in the 5-year-olds; and 9-year-olds grouped primarily by conceptual attributes. Performance on a memory task showed the developmental shift from color to form to concept, while cued recall showed…

This study investigated children's developmental differences in adopting a clustering strategy while studying items for later recall. The central focus was on developmental differences in the efficient use of study strategies, rather than clustering in recall per se. Twenty-four third- and fifth-graders and 12 college students were given a series…

This paper describes an experiment which investigated the development of recall skills in 120 Caucasian, middle class children in the second, fourth, and sixth grades. Within each age group, four experimental groups were formed in which subjects were asked to remember and recall 16 nouns by: (1) forming mental representations of each word…

This paper examines several recent lines of research concerning category clustering and describes an alternative to the standard category clustering procedure used to study recall organization in younger children. The specific issue considered is the age at which children first show evidence of spontaneous category clustering in their free-recall.…