Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When concepts erode with neuropathology, patients lose knowledge of the visual details that differentiate related items,such as the hump of a camel or the color of a pumpkin. Consequently they fail to differentiate real vs chimeric itemsdiffering in these properties. We assessed whether the same pattern is observed over conceptual development. Childrenviewed a real and chimeric item differing in a single property and decided which was real and which silly. For some items,the correct choice was more prototypic (e.g. a donkey vs a donkey with a hump); for others, less (e.g. a camel vs a camelwith no hump). Stimuli differed in their shape/parts or in color. Like patients with semantic impairments, children moreoften failed to recognize items with atypical parts, even when these were successfully named. The reverse pattern wasobserved for the color task. These results importantly constrain theories of conceptual development.