Learning rule-described and non-rule-described categories: a comparison of children and adults.
Three experiments investigated the ability of 3-, 5-, and 8-year-old children as well as adults to learn sets of perceptual categories. Adults and children performed comparably on categories that could be learned by either a single-dimensional rule or by associative learning mechanisms. However, children showed poorer performance relative to adults in learning categories defined by a disjunctive rule and categories that were nonlinearly separable. Increasing the task demands for adults resulted in child-like performance on the disjunctive categories. Decreasing the task demands for children resulted in more adult-like performance on the disjunctive categories. The authors interpret these results within a multiple-systems approach to category learning and suggest that children have not fully developed the same explicit category learning system as adults.
Minda
John Paul
JP
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, Social Science Centre, London, Ontario, Canada. jpminda@uwo.ca
Desroches
Amy S
AS
Church
Barbara A
BA
D000328:Adult; D001076:Aptitude; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005795:Generalization, Stimulus; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011340:Problem Solving; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012718:Set, Psychology; D014163:Transfer, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult