Preschoolers made numerical comparisons between sets with varying degrees of shared surface similarity. When surface similarity was pitted against numerical equivalence (i.e., crossmapping), children made fewer number matches than when surface similarity was neutral (i.e, all sets contained the same objects). Only children who understood the…

The role of context in categorization was examined in four experiments with three month olds. Findings demonstrated that categorization of a novel object is influenced by the context present when the object is initially encountered and by previous encounters with that object in the category context, indicating that infants are capable of…