CATEGORY LEARNING OF SCHEMATIC FACES IN CHILDREN - RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ATTRIBUTE KNOWLEDGE AND MODES OF PROCESSING

In a pluralistic view of cognitive functioning, it has been proposed t hat, when having to learn categories, individuals can use two forms of processing: either an analytic mode in which the necessary and suffic ient properties are extracted, or a holistic mode in which objects are processed as indivisible webs of attributes and relations. To further investigate this issue, children were observed during a perceptual ca tegorization task based on the Kemler Nelson (1984) paradigm. Besides the usual error pattern, response times and attribute knowledge were u sed to diagnose what process was elicited to learn family resemblance categories. After a study phase of two sets of schematic faces which v aried on six attributes (shape of eyes, nose, etc.), 9-year-old childr en were administered a category assignment task during which response speed and accuracy were recorded. Subsequently, knowledge of individua l attributes was evaluated using a specifically designed task, the att ribute identification task. Convergent data from the two tasks show th at most of the children were multiple attribute learners, but used eit her one attribute (about 60% of the subjects) or more attributes (the remaining 40%) to make category decisions. Reasons for the absence of genuine Gestalt-like processes in our study are discussed.