45 research outputs found
Revealing criterial vagueness in inconsistencies
Sixty undergraduate students made category membership decisions for each of 132
candidate exemplar-category name pairs (e.g., chess – Sports) in each of two separate
sessions. They were frequently inconsistent from one session to the next, both for nominal
categories such as Sports and Fish, and ad hoc categories such as Things You Rescue from
a Burning House. A mixture model analysis revealed that several of these inconsistencies
could be attributed to criterial vagueness: participants adopting different criteria for
membership in the two sessions. This finding indicates that categorization is a probabilistic
process, whereby the conditions for applying a category label are not invariant. Individuals
have various functional meanings of nominal categories at their disposal and entertain
competing goals for ad hoc categories
Children struggle beyond preschool-age in a continuous version of the ambiguous figures task
Children until the age of five are only able to reverse an ambiguous figure when they are informed about the second interpretation. In two experiments, we examined whether children’s difficulties would extend to a continuous version of the ambiguous figures task. Children (Experiment 1: 66 3- to 5-year olds; Experiment 2: 54 4- to 9-year olds) and adult controls saw line drawings of animals gradually morph—through well-known ambiguous figures—into other animals. Results show a relatively late developing ability to recognize the target animal, with difficulties extending beyond preschool-age. This delay can neither be explained with improvements in theory of mind, inhibitory control, nor individual differences in eye movements. Even the best achieving children only started to approach adult level performance at the age of 9, suggesting a fundamentally different processing style in children and adults