A broad literature review revealed that younger children are more likely to categorize objects along complimentary dimensions than older children who tend to categorize according to similarity. This developmental change is discussed in terms of etiology--internal organismic changes or environmental changes. (DP)

The development of the ability to use taxonomic, phonemic and sense impression categories as dimensions of encoding was investigated using third and fifth graders and college students. (ED)

Fifty-six Dutch school children (aged 6-0 to 14-4 years) participated in a study designed to investigate their ability to reason with logical implication. They answered a total of 32 reasoning problems. Before or after each question they were asked a class inclusion question. A high degree of correspondence was found between class inclusion and…

Examines developmental differences in category labeling in a communication situation. Adult women and nine-year-old children instructed seven-year-olds in the organization of groceries in a mock kitchen or in the organization of photographs of common objects into compartments as a "homework" assignment. Both adults and children gave more…

A Piagetian task of spatial functioning and a modified classification problem (simple intersection) were administered to children to test the degree of relationship between logical and sublogical operations by defining their common cognitive components. (Author/DB)

Children 3.5 to 5 years old were asked to judge which of several possible sets of parts matched a configured target form and to copy the target forms. Found a significant association between age and performance on the perception task and consistency across the two tasks. (MDM)

Two studies examined whether object names and functions act as cues to categories for infants. Findings indicated that both 14- and 18-month-olds were more likely to select the category match after being shown a novel category exemplar with its function than when given no additional cues. Only at 18 months did naming the objects enhance…

Examined developmental change in category representation in the first year of life. Experiment 1 tested infants of three, five, and seven months in a visual recognition memory procedure. Results indicated change in the nature but not the structure of infant form categories. Experiment 2 ruled out a priori preferences as the basis for findings of…

Three studies examined preschool children's understanding of categorical hierarchies, testing their ability to form categories at different levels of generality and to include the same objects in multiple categories. Found that, contrary to the implications of previous studies, two- and three-year olds appear to have both categorization skills.…

When children learn categories, they do not learn isolated facts but rather systems of knowledge. These systems of knowledge are composed of property-property (e.g., things with wings tend to have feathers), property-role (e.g., things with eyes tend to eat), and role-role (e.g., things that eat tend to sleep) correlations. Research has shown that…

A negative transfer paradigm was used to assess kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children's use of category relations in lists presented for recall. Results showed that negative transfer effects increased with age, with kindergarten children showing no evidence of interference relative to a control group. (Author/MP)

Examines the effectiveness of training children from grades 3 through 7 to organize information to be recalled into predetermined class inclusion hierarchies. Examines the effect of this training on performance on a transfer task requiring subjective organization. (BD)

An alternating sort-recall procedure was used in three experiments to train third-, fifth-, and seventh-grade students in the use of organizational techniques as memory aids. (Author/JMB)