A shift in children’s use of perceptual and causal cues to categorization

The present study explores the ability of 3.5- and 4.5-year-olds to use a causal property (making a machine light up and play music) to build categories of objects, and attach a name to them. First, this use is assessed in the presence or absence of simple perceptual information (color and shape) leading to a conflicting categorization. Second, the role of language is evaluated by varying how the experimenter describes the actions of the objects on the machine. Results show that although children of both ages use causal properties to categorize objects in the absence of conflicting perceptual categorization, older children are more likely than younger children to favor the causal over the perceptual categorization when they conflict. An effect of language was also found with the older children, with explicit causal descriptions of the events enhancing causal categorizations. Finally, a memory probe showed that younger children were likely to misremember causal information when it conflicted with perceptual information. These results suggest that perceptual, linguistic and causal information are all correlated for the younger children, whereas these cues are more independent for the older children.