Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Categories are essential for thinking, learning, and communi-cating. Research has shown that young children and adultstreat categories very differently, with young children favor-ing whole objects while adults focus on the key informationin most cases. If so, then how can young children learn cat-egories requiring focused attention to key features? Studieshave shown that drawing attention to rules had facilitative ef-fects. We sought to identify whether the effect was driven byinstruction about rules or by stimulus-driven factors. Our re-sults suggest that even with instruction, 4-year-olds were notable to attend to key information. Simply making importantinformation more salient, however, allowed them to learn thecategory and transfer to situations when the key feature wasno longer salient.