Infants flexibly use different dimensions to categorize objects

Dev Psychol. 2006 Nov;42(6):1000-11. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.42.6.1000.

Abstract

A sequential-touching task was used to investigate whether 14-month-old infants can rapidly change how they categorize a set of objects, recognizing new groupings of objects they had previously categorized in a different way. When presented with a collection of objects that could be categorized by shape (balls vs. blocks) or material (soft vs. hard), infants who showed stable performance on a superordinate-level categorization task or who had larger receptive vocabularies exhibited flexible categorization; they categorized the objects by material as well as by shape. Infants who rarely responded to the superordinate-level categorization task or who had smaller receptive vocabularies, in contrast, categorized primarily by shape. Thus, flexible categorization is related to development in other cognitive domains.

Publication types

  • Comparative Study
  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Association Learning / physiology*
  • Child Development*
  • Concept Formation / physiology*
  • Female
  • Generalization, Psychological*
  • Humans
  • Infant
  • Language Development
  • Male
  • Pattern Recognition, Visual / physiology
  • Photic Stimulation / methods