title: Rule-based category use in preschool children.
abstract: We report two experiments suggesting that development of rule use in children can be predicted by applying metrics of complexity from studies of rule-based category learning in adults. In Experiment 1, 124 3- to 5-year-olds completed three new rule-use tasks. The tasks featured similar instructions but varied in the complexity of the rule structures that could be abstracted from the instructions. This measure of complexity predicted children's difficulty with the tasks. Children also completed a version of the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sorting task. Although this task featured quite different instructions from those in our "complex" task, performance on these two tasks was correlated, as predicted by the rule-based category approach. Experiment 2 predicted findings of the relative difficulty of the three new tasks in 36 5-year-olds and also showed that response times varied with rule structure complexity. Together, these findings suggest that children's rule use depends on processes also involved in rule-based category learning. The findings likewise suggest that the development of rule use during childhood is protracted, and the findings bolster claims that some of children's difficulty in rule use stems from limits in their ability to represent complex rule structures.
authors.affiliation: BCL Lab, UMR 7320, Department of Psychology, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, 06357 Nice, France. Electronic address: fabien.mathy@unice.fr.
authors.forename: Fabien
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Mathy
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada.
authors.forename: Ori
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Friedman
authors.affiliation: BCL Lab, UMR 7320, Department of Psychology, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, 06357 Nice, France.
authors.forename: Brigitte
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Courenq
authors.affiliation: BCL Lab, UMR 7320, Department of Psychology, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, 06357 Nice, France; Maison des Sciences de l'Homme et de l'Environnement Ledoux, Université de Franche-Comté, 25030 Besançon cedex, France.
authors.forename: Lucie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Laurent
authors.affiliation: Neurosciences Laboratory of Besançon EA-481, Université de Franche-Comté, 25030 Besançon cedex, France.
authors.forename: Jean-Louis
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Millot
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis
keywords: Boolean complexity; Categorization; Development; Mental flexibility; Rule use; Rules