Abstract:

The central idea of recent studies in developmental psychology is that we should try to "build on" the things that children can already do at an early age, meaning that the child has more complex cognitive abilities than we considered before. The present paper focuses on the investigation of cognitive flexibility in preschool children, at the level of categorization (the ability to classify the same object in more categories according to more categorization criterions - e.g. perceptive or thematic) and at the level of representation (complex cognitive schemata). Its main objective is to investigate the factors that influence the ability to flexibly categorize objects at early ages. After presenting the state-of-the-art of this field, the paper describes four case studies that provide a thorough analysis of the tasks used in this kind of research. The children are aged between 3 to 4 years and the method is based on object-matching task and on object grouping. The objects are "double-objects", with an apparent and a real identity (e.g., a rubber that looks like a pencil). The ability to categorize one object in several classes proves that children are capable of decentration early in their development, this ability being important for efficient problem solving. This paper is part of a bigger project and it represents a preliminary step for building a coherent model of categorization in children and for the investigation of possible functional deficits at the level of cognitive flexibility between 2-6 years of age.

Keywords: cognitive development, categorization, cognitive flexibility