Abstract

Young children often exhibit flexible behaviors relying on different kinds of information in different situations. This flexibility has been traditionally attributed to conceptual knowledge. Reported research demonstrates that flexibility can be acquired implicitly and it does not require conceptual knowledge. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-yearolds successfully learned different context-predictor contingencies and subsequently flexibly relied on different predictors in different contexts. Experiments 2A and 2B indicated that flexible generalization stems from implicit attentional learning rather than from rule discovery, and Experiment 3 pointed to very limited strategic control over generalization behaviors in 4- to 5-year-olds. These findings indicate that mundane mechanisms grounded in associative and attentional learning may give rise to smart flexible behaviors. Even early in development, people’s generalization is remarkably flexible—depending on a situation, people may rely on different kinds of information. This flexibility has been found in a variety of generalization tasks, including lexical extension, categorization, and property induction. For example, in a lexical extension task (Jones, Smith, & Landau, 1991), 2- to 3-year-olds were presented with a target, which was named (i.e., ‘‘this is a dax’’), and asked to find another dax among test items. Children extended the label by shape alone when the target and test objects were presented without eyes. However, they extended the label by shape and texture when the objects were presented with eyes. Children exhibit similar flexibility in categorization and induction tasks. For example, in a categorization task, 3- to 4-year-olds were more likely to group items on the basis of color if the items were introduced as food, but on the basis of shape if the items were introduced as toys (Macario, 1991). In another task, 4- to 5-year-olds were presented with a target and two test items, such that one test item shared the label with the target and the other looked similar to the target. Participants were then told that the target had a particular property and asked which

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