CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

How children learn to form supra-ordinate categories: A training study This research investigates how children learn to categorize familiar objects into supra-ordinate categories. As a base-line, Experiment 1 showed 6-years-olds were able to form supra-ordinate categories, whereas 3-years-olds were not. Then, a training study assessed whether 3-years-olds´s failures in categorization at higher-order levels can be turn into a successfully resolved in a child-adult collaborative interaction (instruction-conditions) or in absence of this mediated experience (no-instruction condition). As predicted, only the group who received instruction into collaboration about what familiar objects must be compared (comparison-instruction) or what category-properties must be inferred (conceptual-based instruction), arrived at a satisfactory categorization (Posttest). The main results raise two questions about the status of social interaction in category development: a) instruction as a precondition for developmental changes, b) the dependence on social interactions as a possible explanation of why higher-order categories are acquired rather later in development.