Abstract:

Continuing the investigation of categorization in preschool children, this study focuses on the aspects they take into account when they group objects. Trying to see whether children categorize based on the feature abstraction model or on the exemplar model, the present case studies show that they take into account both the exemplar as a whole and some specific features. The children are aged between 3 and 5 years of age and the methods are object sorting and object-matching task. Beside the analysis of the relevant features for children when grouping objects, the study points out the influence of several factors on the categorization behavior at this age, such as familiarity of objects, type of task, preferences.

Keywords: categorization, features, cognitive development