Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do people learn categories and transfer learning? This study addressed this question by examining the roleof attention in the development of category learning and transfer. Participants (adults and 4-year-olds) were trained with twocategories including deterministic and probabilistic features and their attention was directed to either type of features. Aftertraining, participants learned two new categories and their categorization and memory for exemplars were tested. Resultsindicated that adults and 4-year-olds were able to be trained to use either a similarity-based or rule-based strategy. However,adults failed to transfer and went back to their default rule-based strategy in novel situations, whereas 4-year-olds transferredthe learned strategy. Furthermore, in contrast to adults exhibiting better memory for features used in categorization, 4-year-oldsremembered multiple features well regardless of categorization. These results have important implications for understandingthe development of categorization and the role of attention in cognitive development.