Ann E Ellis and Lisa M Oakes (2006)
Infants flexibly use different dimensions to categorize objects.
Dev Psychol 42(6):1000-11.
A sequential-touching task was used to investigate whether 14-month-old infants can rapidly change how they categorize a set of objects, recognizing new groupings of objects they had previously categorized in a different way. When presented with a collection of objects that could be categorized by shape (balls vs. blocks) or material (soft vs. hard), infants who showed stable performance on a superordinate-level categorization task or who had larger receptive vocabularies exhibited flexible categorization; they categorized the objects by material as well as by shape. Infants who rarely responded to the superordinate-level categorization task or who had smaller receptive vocabularies, in contrast, categorized primarily by shape. Thus, flexible categorization is related to development in other cognitive domains.
automatic medline import
Link to PubMed entry
Exploring the Mind Speaker Series - Dr. Paul Ekman, UC San Francisco