Category label effects on Chinese children’s inductive inferences: Modulation by perceptual detail and category specificity

Inductive generalization with familiar categories: developmental changes in children's reliance on perceptual similarity and kind information

“…The findings above taken together with the findings of Experiment 1 and the findings reported in several other studies (Fisher et al, 2011 ; Long et al, 2012 ; Godwin et al, 2013 ) present a striking contrast to studies suggesting that children have difficulty making category-based inferences until about 9 years of age (Sloutsky and Spino, 2004 ; Sloutsky et al, 2007 ; Badger and Shapiro, 2012 ). One potentially important distinction between these two sets of studies is familiarity of the stimuli: the former studies used real familiar categories, whereas the latter used novel artificial categories.…”

Development of inductive generalization with familiar categories

“…As discussed, some studies suggest that children are unlikely to make category-consistent inferences until approximately 9 years of age (Badger & Shapiro, 2012;Sloutsky, Kloos, & Fisher, 2007), whereas other studies report that children can make such inferences by 6 years of age Godwin et al, 2013;Long et al 2011). Aside from procedural differences among these studies, a potentially important distinction is that the former studies used novel artificial categories whereas the latter studies used real familiar categories.…”

“…Specifically, induction tasks often seek to ensure that children's performance is not an outcome of a simple matching strategy. As a result, most experimental paradigms introduce conflict between perceptual similarity and category membership (Gelman & Markman, 1986;Long et al 2011;Sloutsky & Fisher, 2004) and thereby impose the need for inhibitory control to resolve the conflict between different sources of information. Other experimental paradigms remove perceptual similarity as a possible source of information Godwin et al, 2013;Fisher et al in press), resulting in a task that imposes significant demands on working memory.…”

Development of Inductive Generalization

“…Yet familiarity of categories under consideration may be important to children's inductive inferences. Specifically, in most studies that use novel categories, children struggle to make category‐consistent inferences until approximately 9 years (e.g., ), whereas in most studies that use familiar natural categories, children make such inferences reliably by age 6 and even earlier (e.g., ). For example, in one study, researchers first trained 3‐ to 9‐year‐olds to discriminate two categories of novel (artificial) bugs based on a causally relevant and biologically plausible category‐inclusion rule: “Sandbugs live in the sand and have round heads for soft burrows… Rockbugs live in rocks and have sharp pointy heads for digging” (, p. 137).…”

“…Third, as discussed earlier, in several recent studies, even young children are not limited to making inferences solely on the basis of perceptual similarity . For instance, in one series of studies, children were asked to make inductive inferences when no useful perceptual information was provided: Familiar objects were described as hiding behind identical doors (therefore children could not rely on the overlap in visual features to make inferences) and category information was communicated by semantically similar labels (therefore children could not rely on the overlap in auditory features to make inferences; ; cf.…”