Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The context you learn in influences how you recall information. When there are multiple competing sources of informationto be recalled, context dependency may help activate information that is hard to retrieve. This study examines its effects onlearning shape and texture categories signaled by redundant correlated contextual cues. Three-year-olds learned shape andtexture in two conditions: a contextual separation condition and a contextual overlap condition. Children in the separationcondition learned shape in one context and learned texture in a second context. Children in the overlap condition learnedboth shape and texture on both contexts. After training, children were asked to find a texture match to test if they could shifttheir attention away from shape. Children in the separation condition chose the texture match more often than children inthe overlap condition, suggesting a benefit of using contextual cues to shift dominant biases.