To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

Examines the relative utility of exemplar and linguistic information for acquiring basic and superordinate categories. Developmental differences were predicted in the ability to benefit from the linguistically specified information. Preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children were tested. (Author/SS)

Second, fourth, and sixth graders were given passage of text whose material could be represented as four-level class inclusion hierarchy. Students were asked to construct external representation of passage and answer questions that required them to reason about contents of passage. Quality of representation and performance on question tasks were…