PROCESSING MODES OF SCHEMATIC FACES IN 5-YEAR-OLD AND 10-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN

Kemler Nelson (1984) reported an experiment (Expt 4) intended to demon strate that the processing of categories evolves with development from a holistic to an analytic mode. Five- and 10-year-old children were a sked to learn two categories of schematic faces which were either defi ned by a single attribute value or structured by overall similarity. A s the identification of the children's processing modes was ambiguous, we replicated this experiment, with additional criteria to differenti ate between holistic and multi-attribute processing. Results showed th at both the 5- and 10-year-old children used an analytic processing mo de. The main developmental difference concerned the number of attribut es on which their categorization judgments were based. These results c an be related to the format of the stimuli.