title: Who is she? Changes in the person context affect categorization.
abstract: Changes between the learning and testing contexts affect learning, memory, and generalization. We examined whether a change (between learning and testing) in the person children were interacting with affects generalization. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children were trained on eight novel noun categories by one experimenter. Children were tested for their ability to generalize the label to a new category member by either the same experimenter who trained them or by a novel experimenter. Three-year-old children's performance was not affected by who they were tested by. Four- and five-year-old children's performance was lower when tested by the novel experimenter. The results are discussed in terms of source monitoring and the effect of perceptual context change on category generalization.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Elizabeth R
authors.initials: ER
authors.lastname: Goldenberg
authors.forename: Catherine M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Sandhofer
keywords: categorization; cognitive development; context; generalization; memory; word learning