Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In two experiments, children aged four years and adults were presented with unfamiliar stimuli. They had to segment them into relevant parts. Stimuli presented in a category shared global shape and features, but each occurrence of a potential feature was different. Results of the first experiment show that adults and children found the relevant features despite the differences between occurrences of potential features. Children's selections differed from adults' selections in terms of coherence of the segmentations. In the second experiment, the hypothesis that children used the global shape of the stimuli to find the relevant features was tested. The global shape of stimuli was manipulated in order to assess its role on feature selection. Results demonstrated that the number of incoherences produced by children increased when they could not rely on a global shape for their segmentation. The results are discussed in terms of the relative influence of configural and featural aspects of the stimuli. It is argued that adults rely more on feature identity than children when they segment stimuli into relevant features.