Utilization of Perceptual and Conceptual Attributes in Children's Sorting Behavior as a Function of Age and Category Similarity

Abstract

120 children from 5 to 9 yr. of age were trained on a redundant sorting task which could be solved by using either perceptual or conceptual attributes of the instances and were given a probe task to assess which attribute they had used in the sorting. The probability of using conceptual attributes increased with age and was more often in the task with instances of dissimilar categories than in the task with instances of similar categories. The interaction of age by task showed that developmental changes in the use of perceptual and conceptual attributes depended not only on age but similarity of category of instances used in the task.