Slack:
https://bcccd.slack.com/archives/C02P9HY0TP1
Shkurenko Tatyana, Sudorgina Yulia, Zherdeva Maria, Afanasieva Victoria, Kotov Alexey, Arsalidou MarieHigher School of Economics, Moscow, RussiaLearning new categories occurs through a strategy of remembering surface similarity of objects, or through learning verbal rules. It has been shown that children are more likely to focus on surface similarity (Miles, Minda, 2009), and that the transition in the strategies used occurs at age 6-8. According to the COVIS model (Ashby, Valentin, 2017), cognitive control and working memory play an important role in learning verbal rules. Working memory is related to a characteristic such as mental attention capacity (Powell, Arsalidou, Vogan & Taylor, 2014), and verbal flexibility is related to cognitive control (Snyder, Munakataa, 2010). In the present study, we tested hypotheses about the relationship of category learning performance to two indices: mental attention capacity and cognitive control. We were interested in two age groups: 6-8 years old (age of transition between strategies) and 9-11 years old. We used a task to measure the performance of learning the new categories (Deng, Sloutsky, 2016): children were taught to distinguish fictional creatures and then determine category membership by switching defining and probabilistic features. We also used tasks to measure mental attention capacity (Powell et al., 2014) and verbal flexibility (Snyder, Munakataa, 2010). Correlation analysis found a positive correlation between the mental attention capacity and category learning success in each age group. However, no relationship between categorical learning performance and verbal flexibility was found in any of the age groups. These results will be interpreted with the COVIS model.
Funding: The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 19-313-51010
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