Evidence for an age‐independent process in category learning

Abstract

After learning to categorize a set of alien-like stimuli in the context of a story, a group of 5-year-old children and adults judged pairs of stimuli from different categories to be less similar than did groups not learning the category distinction. In a same-different task, the learning group made more errors on pairs of non-identical stimuli from the same category than did the other groups, suggesting increased within-category item similarity, or compression. These expansion and compression effects add further support to the view that concept formation involves systematic changes in the metric of similarity space within which objects are represented. They also suggest that these processes do not vary with age, which is at least consistent with the hypothesis that they are fundamental to the mechanisms underlying concept formation.

Children’s Representations of Taxonomic Categories for Application in a Web Portal: An Exploratory Study

“…Although differences can be observed between the hierarchical structure which we had constructed with young users in mind, and the girls' final concept map, these are minor and relate more to labeling than to categorization techniques per se. In this respect it confirms earlier findings that conceptual structures built by adults and children are strikingly similar (see, for example, Livingston & Andrews, 2005). It would be advantageous to repeat the task with a bigger number of children -boys as well as girls -and at younger ages.…”

“…More recent studies, however, have found that adults also use thematic and script categories when the relations are sufficiently strong (Lin & Murphy, 2001;Murphy, 2001) and that children can apply taxonomic categories (Nguyen & Murphy, 2003). In fact, striking similarities have been found between the conceptual structures of adults and children (Livingston & Andrews, 2005).…”

The perceptual effects of learning object categories that predict perceptual goals.

“…First, we will assess whether learning the primary category boundary that divides the space in two halves leads to acquired distinctiveness, operationalized as better discriminability for pairs of objects that vary along the dimension diagnostic for category learning (i.e., diagnostic pairs), relative to pairs of objects that vary along the non-diagnostic dimension (non-diagnostic pairs) (Goldstone, 1994). We expect to replicate this classical finding but it should be noted that there are only a handful of demonstrations of acquired distinctiveness with complex stimuli in a multidimensional space (Folstein et al, 2012a; 2012b; Goldstone & Steyvers, 2001; Gureckis & Goldstone, 2008; Livingston and Andrews, 2005) 1 . However, as would be the case for similar results in prior studies with simple or complex dimensions, acquired distinctiveness could be attributed to attention being selectively directed toward the entire dimension.…”

The Effects of Categorization on Perceptual Judgment are Robust across Different Assessment Tasks

“…Thus their differing patterns of results were not due to different assessment tasks but rather a different type of comparison stimulus. Livingston and Andrews [13] used artificial "alien" figures and obtained expansion using a similarity rating task and compression using a same-different task, but without rendering data from the two tasks comparable in the way that we did here and treating task as an independent variable, we cannot but sure that task had a significant effect on the pattern of learned CP results. Even if it did, it would be important to determine whether that result is replicable and genuinely conflicts with the results of the current study.…”

“…However, few studies have reported differences in the kind of CP effect observed based on experimental manipulations, though there are exceptions. For example, Goldstone, Lippa, and Shiffrin [12] and Livingston and Andrews [13] both reported two qualitatively different CP effects exhibited by the same subjects when they were tested in two…”