Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Young children tend to differ from adults in how they learn new categories. In comparison to adults (who relyon selective attention and tend to form explicit rules), children distribute attention widely, forming similarity-based categoryrepresentations. But, when attention is explicitly directed toward the rule with top-down feedback, children exhibit rule-based classification–though memory performance still indicates distributed attention. Little is known, however, how bottom-upattentional cueing affects the category representations that children form. In our experiment 4-year-olds learned to classifyalien creatures composed of binary features. A single “deterministic” feature perfectly predicted category membership, whileother features were probabilistically predictive. We manipulated the saliency of the deterministic feature, making it growand shrink. This manipulation was remarkably effective at facilitating category learning and rule-based classification, butrecognition memory still showed evidence of distributed attention. These results help elucidate the important role of attentionalprocesses in the development of categorization.