Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Young children can generalize properties to novel stimuli, but the mechanism underlying these early inductions is stilldebated. Some researchers argue that from an early age induction relies on category information and undergoes littledevelopment, while others believe that early induction is similarity-based, and the use of categories emerges over time.This present study brings new evidence to the debate by exploring the kinds of features 4-year-old children and adults (N= 123) rely on in their induction. Our results indicate that induction undergoes dramatic development: young childrentend to rely on salient features when performing induction, whereas adults rely primarily on category information. Weargue that the reported findings present evidence challenging category-based accounts of early induction, while supportingsimilarity-based accounts.