Abstract

Two experiments examined the impact of causal relations between features on categorization by adults and 5-6-year-old children. Participants learned about artificial categories containing instances with two causally related features and two non-causal features. They then selected the most likely category member from a series of novel test pairs. Classification patterns and logistic regression were used to diagnose the presence of independent effects of causal coherence, causal status and relational centrality. Adult classification was driven primarily by coherence when causal links were deterministic (Experiment 1), but showed additional influences of causal status and centrality when links were probabilistic (Experiment 2). Children’s classification was based primarily on causal coherence in both cases. These results suggest that the generative model [Rehder, B. (2003). A causalmodel theory of conceptual representation and categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 1141-1159] provides a good account of causal categorization in both children and adults. Children’s Causal Categorization 3 It is well established that causal knowledge plays an important role in adult categorization and

Citations