PSY 457LEC Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Habituation
Document Summary
Piaget: not until later in the preoperational period. Ok, so if children don"t learn to categorize until after 4 yrs of age, then how can we explain. Perhaps using overt responses causes underestimation of children"s early abilities. Goal: to investigate the exclusiveness of categorical representations for horses and cats. Stimuli: pictures of cats, horses, tigers, female lions, zebras and giraffes. Fam: 12 horses; test: novel horse + cat, zebra, giraffe. Fam: 12 cats; test: novel cat + horse, tiger, fem. lion. 3-4-mo -olds can form categories of horses that exclude cats, zebras, giraffes. They can also form categories of cats that exclude horses and tigers, but include female lions. Early categories of horses display considerable differentiation in its exclusion of members of contrasting categories. Categories for cats, on the other hand, appear more inclusive. Perhaps horse category would be more inclusive if we had tested them on more similar items (e. g. , donkeys, gazelles)
