Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Both children and adults can learn new categories when presented with a rule about a perceptual feature. Likecategorization, numerical abstraction requires the ability to ignore irrelevant (non-numeric) perceptual features when makingdecisions about relevant (numeric) features. The present study fuses these two lines of research by training 5-7 year oldsand adults in a categorization task, in which they must form a rule about a fraction-based category. Can children form thismathematical category readily? Will they be able to do so without any formal instruction? How does this ability developor change across the lifespan? We find that young children and adults readily form fraction-based categories, indicating thatchildren can think about proportional information prior to formal schooling. Additionally, an ability to map between visual andsymbolic representations aided both children and adults in this numeric categorization task, with children showing additionalgains in traditional fraction knowledge.