title: Prior knowledge and exemplar encoding in children's concept acquisition.
abstract: Three experiments examined how children's domain knowledge and observation of exemplars interact during concept acquisition and how exposure to novel exemplars causes revision of such knowledge. In Experiments 1 (N = 126) and 2 (N = 64), children aged 4 to 10 years were shown exemplars of fictitious animal categories that were either unrelated to, or consistent with, their prior knowledge in 25% or 75% of presented exemplars. In Experiment 3, children (N = 290) saw fictitious animal, artifact, or unfamiliar social categories that were either consistent or inconsistent with their prior knowledge in 20%, 40%, 60%, or 80% of exemplars. In the test, children made judgments about the likely co-occurence of features. In all experiments, prior knowledge and exemplar observation independently influenced children's categorization judgments. Utilization of prior knowledge was consistent across age and domain, but 10-year-olds were more sensitive to observed feature covariation. Training with larger categories increased the impact of observed feature covariation and decreased reliance on prior knowledge.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Newcastle, Callaghan NSW, Australia. carmicha@psychology.newcastle.edu.au
authors.forename: C A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Carmichael
authors.forename: B K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: Hayes
mesh_terms: D001245:Association Learning; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D011340:Problem Solving; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics