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Category Membership (category + membership)
Selected AbstractsThe Effect of Vocabulary Size on Toddlers' Receptiveness to Unexpected Testimony About Category MembershipINFANCY, Issue 2 2007Vikram K. Jaswal Children must be willing to accept some of what they hear "on faith," even when that testimony conflicts with their own expectations. The study reported here investigated the relation among vocabulary size, object recognition, and 24-month-olds' (N = 40) willingness to accept potentially surprising testimony about the category to which an object belongs. Results showed that children with larger vocabularies were better able to recognize atypical exemplars of familiar categories than children with smaller vocabularies. However, they were also most likely to accept unexpected testimony that an object that looked like a member of one familiar category was actually a member of another. These results indicate that 24-month-olds trust classifications provided by adult labeling patterns even when they conflict with the classifications children generate on their own. [source] Essentialism in the absence of language?DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2010Evidence from rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) We explored whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) share one important feature of human essentialist reasoning: the capacity to track category membership across radical featural transformations. Specifically, we examined whether monkeys , like children (Keil, 1989) , expect a transformed object to have the internal properties of its original category. In two experiments, monkeys watched as an experimenter visually transformed a familiar fruit (e.g. apple) into a new kind of fruit (e.g. coconut) either by placing a fruit exterior over the original, or by removing an exterior shell and revealing the inside kind of fruit. The experimenter then pretended to place an inside piece of the transformed fruit into a box which the monkey was allowed to search. Results indicated that monkeys searched the box longer when they found a piece of fruit inconsistent with the inside kind, suggesting that the monkeys expected that the inside of the transformed fruit would taste like the innermost kind they saw. These results suggest that monkeys may share at least one aspect of psychological essentialism: They maintain category-specific expectations about an object's internal properties even when that object's external properties change. These results therefore suggest that some essentialist expectations may emerge in the absence of language, and thus raise the possibility that such tendencies may emerge earlier in human development than has previously been considered. [source] Knowing who likes who: The early developmental basis of coalition understandingEUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2010Lara Platten Group biases based on broad category membership appear early in human development. However, like many other primates humans inhabit social worlds also characterised by small groups of social coalitions which are not demarcated by visible signs or social markers. A critical cognitive challenge for a young child is thus how to extract information concerning coalition structure when coalitions are dynamic and may lack stable and outwardly visible cues to membership. Therefore, the ability to decode behavioural cues of affiliations present in everyday social interactions between individuals would have conferred powerful selective advantages during our evolution. This would suggest that such an ability may emerge early in life, however, little research has investigated the developmental origins of such processing. The present paper will review recent empirical research which indicates that in the first 2 years of life infants achieve a host of social-cognitive abilities that make them well adapted to processing coalition-affiliations of others. We suggest that such an approach can be applied to better understand the origins of intergroup attitudes and biases. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Social categorization and fit detection under cognitive load: efficient or effortful?EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2005Karl Christoph Klauer Participants perceived a discussion between members of two social categories in a name-matching paradigm. Discussions either exhibited inter-category fit, defined as a covariation of category membership and the category members' attitude positions, or not. Orthogonally, there was cognitive load at encoding, load at retrieval, or no concurrent load. Memory for the statements and memory for the speaker of a statement were affected by load with little evidence for fit effects. Conversely, category memory, reconstructive category guessing and perceived fit were affected by inter-category fit with little evidence for load effects. The results suggest that category activation is sensitive to inter-category fit and that fit detection is robust against moderate amounts of cognitive load. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | ||||||||||