Preschoolers' use of surface similarity in object comparisons: Taking context into account [An article from: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Previous research has emphasized the role of within-match similarity in children's comparisons. The current study investigated another potentially important contributing factor, namely the distinctiveness of the matching items relative to other items in the scene. Using a well-known relational mapping task, we found that 3- and 4-year-olds made more correct matches between identical objects when those objects were maximally distinctive from the foils. In a cross-mapping experiment, where same relative size was pitted against object similarity, 3-year-olds made more incorrect object matches when the objects were both similar to each other and distinctive from the foils. Furthermore, 3- and 4-year-olds performed the same, regardless of within-match similarity, so long as the ratios of within-match and nonmatch similarity were roughly equal. These findings suggest that children's comparisons are guided by a ratio consisting of many pairwise similarity relations, including (but not limited to) the degree of within-match similarity.