The development and robustness of young children's understanding of aspectuality.
We investigated whether 6-year-olds' understanding of perceptual aspectuality was sufficiently robust to deal with the presence of irrelevant information. A total of 32 children chose whether to look or feel to locate a specific object (identifiable by sight or touch) from four objects that were hidden. In half of the trials, the objects were different on only one modality (e.g., four objects that felt different but were the same color). In the remainder of the trials, the objects also differed (partially) on one irrelevant modality (e.g., four objects that felt different, two red and two blue, where the goal was to locate the soft object). Performance was worse on the latter trials. We discuss children's difficulty in dealing with irrelevant information.
School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. gmw537@bham.ac.uk
Gillian M
GM
Waters
Sarah R
SR
Beck
D002648:Child; D003118:Color Perception; D032882:Comprehension; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011340:Problem Solving; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D013028:Space Perception