Table 1.
Description of Participants.
Figure 1.
Rule-based category structure.
The vertical line separating Category A and Category B represents the strategy that maximizes categorization accuracy (Ashby & Gott, 1988). Points on the left are members of Category A and points on the right are members of Category B. The learner must base responding on the frequency dimension while ignoring irrelevant variation on the orientation dimension. The optimal rule could be phrased as: “Crystal balls with few lines go in Category A, crystal balls with many lines go in Category B”.
Table 2.
Distribution Parameters for the Rule-Based Category Set.
Figure 2.
A sample trial from the rule-based categorization task.
Figure 3.
Category learning performance for children and adults across 80 trials.
Error bars denote standard error of the mean.
Figure 4.
Percentage of participants fit by a frequency model (optimal or suboptimal), orientation model, or a guessing model.
It should be noted that among those best fit by a frequency model, only two adults and two children (one 8-year old and one 10-year old) were better fit by the suboptimal frequency model.
Table 3.
Means, standard deviations, and intercorrelations among the study variables for all participants.
Table 4.
Average executive functioning test performance as a function of task appropriateness in children (ages 6–11).