Prior knowledge and subtyping effects in children's category learning

Two experiments examined how 5- and 10-year-old children revise their category representations when exposed to exemplars that are congruent or incongruent with existing knowledge. During training children were presented with exemplars containing features that were congruent or incongruent with children's social stereotypes together with a stereotype-neutral feature. In the knowledge-subtyping condition this neutral feature predicted the stereotype-congruence of the other features. In the knowledge-standard condition the neutral feature was uncorrelated with stereotype-congruence. At test children made judgements about feature co-occurrence within the learned category. In each experiment these judgements were influenced by both stereotypical beliefs and exemplar observation. Stereotypical beliefs, however, had a greater influence on co-occurrence judgements in the knowledge-subtyping than in the standard conditions. In Experiment 2 these effects were shown to generalize to judgements about features that were not presented during training. These results challenge current models of knowledge-based categorization by showing that exemplar structure determines whether novel exemplar features are incorporated into category representations.