title: Learning rule-described and non-rule-described categories: a comparison of children and adults.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, Social Science Centre, London, Ontario, Canada. jpminda@uwo.ca
authors.forename: John Paul
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Minda
authors.forename: Amy S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Desroches
authors.forename: Barbara A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Church
mesh_terms: 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