The Role of External Sources of Information in Children's Evaluative Food Categories

Evaluative food categories are value‐laden assessments, which reflect the healthfulness and palatability of foods (e.g. healthy/unhealthy, yummy/yucky). In a series of three studies, this research examines how 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children (N = 147) form evaluative food categories based on input from external sources of information. The results indicate that children prefer to ask a mom and teacher over a cartoon and child for information about the evaluative status of foods. However, children are cautious to accept information about healthy foods from all of the external sources compared with unhealthy, yummy and yucky foods. The results also indicate that providing information about the positive taste of healthy foods helps to encourage children to select healthy foods to eat. Taken together, these results have potential implications for children's health and nutrition education. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Preschool Ontology: The Role of Beliefs About Category Boundaries in Early Categorization

These studies examined the role of ontological beliefs about category boundaries in early categorization. Study 1 found that preschool-age children (N = 48, aged 3–4 years old) have domain-specific beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries; children judged the boundaries of natural kind categories (animal species, human gender) as discrete and strict, but they judged the boundaries of other categories (artifact categories, human race) as more flexible. Study 2 demonstrated that these domain-specific ontological intuitions guide children's learning of new categories; children (N = 28, 3-year-olds) assumed that the boundaries of novel animal categories would be narrower and more strictly defined than novel artifact categories. These data demonstrate that abstract beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries shape early conceptual development.     

Watch out! That could be dangerous: valence-arousal interactions in evaluative processing

Seven studies involving 146 undergraduates examined the effects of stimulus valence and arousal on direct and indirect measures of evaluative processing. Stimuli were emotional slides (Studies 1 to 6) or words (Study 7) that systematically varied in valence and arousal. Evaluative categorization was measured by reaction times to evaluate the stimuli (Studies 2, 3, and 7), latencies related to emotional feelings (Study 3), and incidental effects on motor performance (Studies 4 and 5). A consistent interaction was observed such that evaluation latencies were faster if a negative stimulus was high in arousal or if a positive stimulus was low in arousal. Studies 1, 6, and 7 establish that the findings are not due to stimulus identification processes. The findings therefore suggest that people make evaluative inferences on the basis of stimulus arousal.     

How Children and Adults Name Broken Objects: Inferences and Reasoning About Design Intentions in the Categorization of Artifacts

If inferences about the functions intended by object designers guide the way artifacts are categorized, a broken object should still be considered a member of its original category even though it is currently dysfunctional; however, an object that appears to be dysfunctional by design should not be. Such a comparison was arranged in four studies of lexical categorization. Even with novel categories, 10-year-olds and adults preferentially included broken objects, and they did so spontaneously (Study 1). Younger children did not (Studies 1 and 2). However, when probed about the design intentions behind novel objects, 6-year-olds often inferred them correctly and then took intentions into account to categorize (Study 3). In fact, when 4-year-olds named objects derived from familiar categories, even they spontaneously used design intentions to categorize (Study 4). Accordingly, even young children provided some evidence of categorizing artifacts by inferring and reasoning about intended functions.     

主题关系在4~5岁儿童不同属性归纳推理发展中的作用

为探讨主题关系在儿童归纳推理中的作用,采用经典的三角归纳范式,设计了主题关系和知觉相似冲突、主题关系和分类学关系冲突两种情形,来考察4~5岁儿童在内在属性和情境性属性任务中的归纳推理。结果显示：当主题关系和知觉相似冲突时,从4.5岁开始儿童主要基于主题关系对情境性属性进行归纳推理,而对于内在属性的推论,4~5岁儿童在基于主题关系和基于知觉相似上没有显著差异。当主题关系和分类学关系冲突时,从4.5岁开始儿童主要基于主题关系对情境性属性进行归纳推理,从5岁开始儿童主要基于分类学关系对内在属性进行归纳推理。两个实验结果均发现5岁和5.5岁儿童能够依据不同的属性使用不同的关系推理,表现出归纳灵活性     

What young children think about the relationship between language variation and social difference

Previous work suggests that preschoolers understand that members of some social groups (e.g., based on occupation or gender) speak in distinct ways, but do not understand that members of other social groups (e.g., based on race, culture, or nationality) speak different languages. In these four studies we explored preschool children's inferences about language and social group membership. In Study 1 we found that preschoolers believed that minority race individuals, people wearing unfamiliar clothing, or people living in unfamiliar dwellings were more likely to speak an unfamiliar foreign language than to speak English. Studies 2A and 2B showed that children do not map social group differences to language for all social categories. Specifically, children were more likely to attribute language differences to racial rather than age differences and were more likely to map differences in music preference onto age than racial differences. Results of Study 3 showed children's inferences about language and social group differences were not derived from differences in intelligibility. Study 4 provides insight into why children readily make these language to social kind mappings by identifying a common property that both broad social kinds and distinct languages are thought to share. Together these studies provide evidence that even preschoolers may be coordinating knowledge across content domains in a coherent and meaningful way that underwrites the projection of existing knowledge to unknown instances.     

Food rejection and the development of food category-based induction in 2–6 years old children

We studied children’s inductive inferences within the domain of food categories. There has so far been little research on inductive reasoning about food among children, despite the theoretical and practical importance of knowing what knowledge children bring to the table and how they use it. We tested the hypotheses that children’s food category-based induction performances and their food rejection are negatively correlated, and that these performances are influenced by the colour typicality of the food items. We recruited 126 children aged 2–6 years, and administered a category-based induction task. Participants were successively shown 8 sets of three pictures containing one target picture (a vegetable) and two test pictures (a vegetable dissimilar in colour to the target picture and a fruit similar in colour to the target picture). For each set, participants were told a novel property about the target picture and asked to generalise this property to one of the two test pictures. Additionally, the parents of each child filled out a questionnaire about his or her food rejection tendencies. Results on accuracy (i.e. if participants generalised the properties according to category membership, not perceptual similarity) provided the first empirical evidence in favour of a negative relationship between children’s food rejection and food category-based induction.     

A rule-based categorization deficit in Alzheimer's disease?

This study examined the categorization processes that Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients use during assessments of semantic memory. Rule-based categorization involves the careful, analytic processing of strict criteria to determine category membership, particularly for items from graded categories with ambiguous category membership; similarity-based categorization requires an overall comparison of a test stimulus with a prototype or remembered exemplar of the category and is relatively effective for the rapid categorization of items with unambiguous category membership. To assess these processes in AD, patients were asked to decide the category membership of test stimuli for categories with poorly defined or fuzzy boundaries (e.g., VEGETABLE) and for categories with well-defined boundaries (e.g., FEMALE) and then to judge the representativeness of the test stimulus for its chosen category. A subgroup of AD patients demonstrated a typical pattern of impaired semantic memory compared to healthy control subjects; that is, difficulty deciding the category membership of test items from fuzzy categories. Among these patients, we found no deficit in category membership decisions about items taken from well-defined categories. We also found that AD patients and healthy controls do not differ in their representativeness judgments of items within a correctly judged category. These findings are most consistent with the hypothesis that rule-based categorization difficulty limits semantic memory in AD.     

Teleological Essentialism: Generalized

Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), and inferences about offspring (study 3)—we find support for the view that a broad range of categories—living natural kinds, non-living natural kinds, and artifactual kinds—are essentialized in terms of teleology. Study 4 tests a unique prediction of teleological essentialism and also provides evidence that people make inferences about purposes which in turn guide categorization judgments.     

When looks are everything: appearance similarity versus kind information in early induction

The goal of this research was to examine mechanisms underlying early induction--specifically, the relation between induction and categorization. Some researchers argue that even early in development, induction is based on category-membership information, whereas others argue that early induction is based primarily on similarity. Children 4 and 5 years of age participated in two types of tasks: categorization and induction. Both tasks were performed with artificial animal-like categories in which appearance was pitted against category membership. Although the children readily acquired category-membership information and subsequently used this information in categorization tasks, they ignored category membership during the induction task, relying instead on the appearance of items. These results support the idea that early in development, induction is similarity based.     

When children succeed in changing their responses: Insights from three versions of a flexible categorization task

Cognitive flexibility is a hallmark of human cognition, but its development is still poorly understood. The present work examined the flexibility of categorization in preschool children. Thirty-three participants aged 3–4 years were divided into three groups, with each group receiving a different version of a flexible categorization task in which the targets belonged to two distinct categories. These versions manipulated the type of questions that were asked and the alternation of shape and color games. The children exhibited flexibility when the questions were specific (or asked about attributes). The results support the idea that instructions play a role in children’s performance in sorting tasks. Considering cognitive flexibility as an expression of the interaction between children’s knowledge and abilities on the one hand and the structure, specifics, or demands of the task on the other can help clarify what cognitive flexibility is and how it develops.     

Semantic categorization in the human brain: spatiotemporal dynamics revealed by magnetoencephalography

We examined the cortical representation of semantic categorization using magnetic source imaging in a task that revealed both dissociations among superordinate categories and associations among different base-level concepts within these categories. Around 200 ms after stimulus onset, the spatiotemporal correlation of brain activity elicited by base-level concepts was greater within than across superordinate categories in the right temporal lobe. Unsupervised clustering of data showed similar categorization between 210 and 450 ms mainly in the left hemisphere. This pattern suggests that well-defined semantic categories are represented in spatially distinct, macroscopically separable neural networks, independent of physical stimulus properties. In contrast, a broader, task-required categorization (natural/man-made) was not evident in our data. The perceptual dynamics of the categorization process is initially evident in the extrastriate areas of the right hemisphere; this activation is followed by higher-level activity along the ventral processing stream, implicating primarily the left temporal lobe.     

Teleo‐functional constraints on preschool children's reasoning about living things

These studies explore the degree to which preschool children employ teleological‐functional reasoning – reasoning based on the assumption of function and design – when making inferences about animal behavior. Using a triad induction method, Study 1 examined whether a sensitivity to biological function would lead children to overlook overall similarity and instead attend to relevant functional cues (in the presence of overall dissimilarity), as a basis for generalizing behavioral properties to unfamiliar animals. It found that, between 3 and 4 years of age, children, with increasing consistency, attend to functional features rather than overall similarity when drawing inferences about animal behavior. Children's ability to describe the relevance of functional adaptations to animal behavior also increased with age. Study 2 explored whether Study 1 findings might result from stimulus biases in favor of the function‐based choice. It found that children's attention shifted from functional features to overall similarity when generalizing labels rather than behaviors with the same triads. These results are discussed in relation to the development of biological knowledge.     

Children's category‐based inferences affect classification

Children learn many new categories and make inferences about these categories. Much work has examined how children make inferences on the basis of category knowledge. However, inferences may also affect what is learned about a category. Four experiments examine whether category‐based inferences during category learning influence category knowledge and thereby affect later classifications for 5‐ to 7‐year‐olds. The children learned to classify pictures of new types of creatures on the basis of a salient feature (colour) and then answered a question that required them to make an inference on the basis of other features. At test, children classified pictures that included only some features (without colour). Experiment 1 showed that the features relevant to the inference during learning led to better classification than did features irrelevant to the inference. Experiment 2 replicated this finding even when the relevant features were physically close to the irrelevant features. Experiments 3 and 4 found this effect even when the classification was learned prior to the inference task and even when no mention was made of the categories during inference learning. Taken together, these results show that making inferences during category learning can influence category knowledge and suggest a need to integrate the work on category learning and category‐based inferences.     

Induction with uncertain categories: When do people consider the category alternatives?

These three experiments examined how people make property inferences about exemplars whose category membership is uncertain. Participants were shown two categories and a novel exemplar with a feature that indicated that the exemplar was more likely to belong to one category (target) than to the other (nontarget). Participants then made categorization decisions and property inferences about the novel exemplar. In some conditions, property inferences could be made only by considering both target and nontarget categories. In other conditions, predictions could be based on both categories or on the target category alone. Consistent with previous studies (e.g., Murphy & Ross, 1994, 2005), we found that many people made predictions based only on consideration of the target category. However, the prevalence of such single-category reasoning was greatly reduced by highlighting the costs of neglecting nontarget alternatives and by asking for inferences before categorization decisions. The results suggest that previous work may have exaggerated the prevalence of single-category reasoning and that people may be more flexible in their use of multiple categories in property inference than has been previously recognized.     

Spontaneous trait inferences as self-generated primes: implications for conscious social judgment.

The priming literature has documented the influence of trait terms held outside of conscious awareness on later judgment relevant to the primed trait dimension. The present research demonstrated that spontaneous trait inferences can serve as self-generated primes. In Experiment 1, Ss instructed to memorize trait-implying sentences (thus spontaneously inferring traits outside of consciousness) showed assimilation effects in judgment. Ss instructed to form inferences from these sentences (thus consciously inferring traits) showed contrast effects. Experiment 2 demonstrated that these findings were due to semantic activation rather than to a general evaluative response. When evaluatively inconsistent trait constructs were primed, similar patterns of assimilation and contrast were found. Implications for the ubiquitous occurrence of priming through the process of social categorization are discussed.     

The structure and content of the male gender role stereotype: An exploration of subtypes

Stereotypic categorization schemas pertaining to the male gender role are examined in two related studies. Study I provides preliminary evidence for four stereotypic categories and their attributes: Businessman, Athlete, Family Man, and Loser. When compared to a similar study on female stereotypes, male stereotypes appear more weakly held. Study II expanded the populations sampled, employing a hierarchical cluster analysis to analyze responses to a card sorting task using attributes from Study I. Differences were found between the three, primarily Caucasian, subject groups. Results support a social cognitive orientation to understanding stereotypes, which suggests that broad categories, such as “men” or “women,” do not capture the commonly made distinctions within these groups, which are more accurately conceptualized as subtypes.     

How do Children Associate Food Type to Illustrated Height and Obesity?

The following three studies examined young children’s and adults’ recognition of the impact of healthy and unhealthy foods on height and weight. Study 1 examined the impact of foods on height and weight. Study 2 examined the role of foods on characters of different ethnicities. Study 3 controlled for participants’ prior knowledge about the impact of food by presenting fictitious alien characters. The results indicated that preschoolers recognized that healthy foods promoted an increase in height but only for African-American images. Adults recognized the impact of nutrition on both height and weight with a greater emphasis of nutrition for weight than height. These results demonstrate that preschoolers’ biological model is more sophisticated and differentiated than previously reported.     

How Do Consumers Transfer Existing Knowledge? A Comparison of Analogy and Categorization Effects

The trend in recent consumer research has been to emphasize the similarities between analogy and categorization. In this investigation, we merge the literature on analogy, categorization, and structure mapping theory to reach a better understanding of their differences. In 3 experiments, we compare consumers’ responses to analogy and categorization cues and find that analogy places much greater constraints on knowledge transfer than categorization by focusing consumers on relational similarities. Illustrating this, the analogy group in Study 1 was just as likely as the categorization group to generate relational inferences, but much less likely to generate attribute inferences. Likewise, the results of Study 2 indicate that the analogy group restricted their processing of features lying outside the common relational system, leading to inferior recall relative to the categorization group. Building on these findings, Study 3 demonstrates that, under certain circumstances, analogy and categorization work together syn‐ergistically to enhance consumer memory.