Children's Categorization Research Articles

Chinese children show racial and skin‐tone salience but little color evasion

AbstractChildren may notice racial differences (i.e., show racial and/or skin‐tone salience), but deliberately avoid mentioning such differences (i.e., color evasion) with increasing age. This contradiction may be due to prevailing egalitarian social norms about race. Color evasion is understudied among children in China. In a sample of 155 Chinese children (71 girls and 84 boys) aged 7–11 years from urban regions of China, we collected measures of children's racial and/or skin‐tone salience and color evasion as well as their attitudes toward light‐skinned East Asian, tan‐skinned East Asian, and White groups. Analyses revealed that racial differences were salient to Chinese children, and that they showed little color evasion. Skin tone was most salient in children's categorization performance. We found a preference hierarchy where light‐skinned East Asian people were favored most, and White people least. Color evasion was negatively related to Chinese children's positive attitudes toward White people. The findings emphasize the importance of social contexts in shaping children's racial attitudes.

Hypodescent or ingroup overexclusion?: Children's and adults' racial categorization of ambiguous black/white biracial faces.

Two processes describe racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial categorization-the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of their socially subordinated racial group (i.e., Black/White Biracial faces categorized as Black) and the ingroup overexclusion effect, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of a salient outgroup, regardless of the group's status. Without developmental research with racially diverse samples, it is unclear when these categorization patterns emerge. Study 1 included White, Black, and racially diverse Biracial children (aged 3- to 7-years) and their parents to test how racial group membership and social context influence face categorization biases. To provide the clearest test of hypodescent and ingroup overexclusion, White participants came from majority White neighborhoods and Black participants from majority Black neighborhoods (with Biracial participants from more racially diverse neighborhoods)-two samples with prominent racial ingroups. Study 2 aimed to replicate the parent findings with a separate sample of White, Black, Black/White Biracial, and Asian adults. Results suggest the ingroup overexclusion effect is present across populations early in development and persists into adulthood. Additionally, categorization was meaningfully related to parental context, pinpointing a pathway that potentially contributes to ingroup overexclusion. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: White, Black, and racially diverse Biracial children and adults tended to categorize racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial faces as racial outgroup members, even if the outgroup was White. This contradicts most work arguing Black/White Biracial racially ambiguous people are more often seen as Black. Children and parents' categorizations were related, though children's categorizations were not related to socialization above and beyond parents' categorizations. Children showed similar categorization patterns across dichotomous and continuous measures.

Early Childhood Discourse and the Categorization of Children: Focused on Care in Childcare Center

Early Childhood Discourse and the Categorization of Children: Focused on Care in Childcare Center

Gender‐based reasoning about novel toys: The role of child and parental factors

AbstractMuch has been established about children's preference for gender‐typed toys, but far less is known about their reasoning about novel toys. Using such toys, this study explored children's emerging use of gender to make predictions about peers as a form of stereotype construction with its correlates. Two to 4‐year‐olds were shown novel, nonstereotyped toys and asked if they and others would like each item. Gender‐typing was measured by liking for familiar gender‐typed toys, and categorization skills by sorting. Parents completed measures on gender language and behavioural expectations. It was found that gender‐centric reasoning (what children like, they expect same‐gender peers but not other‐gender peers to like) was apparent from age 3 years, with boys showing a higher tendency. Apart from age in months, categorization skills and parental behavioural expectations uniquely contributed to children's degree of gender‐centrism. The findings are discussed in relation to cognitive development, parental gender socialization, stereotype formation and practical implications.Highlights From age 3, children tend to predict peers' liking for novel, nonstereotyped toys based on their own and peers' gender as a form of stereotype construction. Older boys are more likely to differentiate between their own novel toy‐liking and that of outgroup peers (girls) compared to girls. Children's categorization skills and their parents' behavioural expectations contribute to gender‐based reasoning, giving scope for interventions based on modifiable factors.

Grass and gravel: Investigating visual properties preschool children and adults use when distinguishing naturalistic images

Little is known about young children's ability to visually categorize complex structures of a naturalistic environment. To investigate this, we analyzed the relevance of different visual properties and superordinate category information to 4- to 5-year-old children's (N = 76) and adults' (N = 72) card sorting decisions. Participants sorted cards depicting complex greyscale images of manmade artifacts, non-living natural elements (e.g., stones), and vegetation into groups, first according to visual similarity and then by the images' superordinate categories. We found that visual properties defined by characteristics of higher-order computations (e.g., variations in shape, distributed detail) predicted children's categorization less than adults. Both age groups' similarity judgements were influenced by the images' assigned superordinate categories—especially by vegetation. Children discriminated vegetation images better than adults when controlling for their overall lower performance. Taken together, these findings demonstrate children's adaptive and flexible processing strategies for complex naturalistic images.

Children prefer pattern over shape during complex categorization.

Numerous studies have shown that children tend to view objects with similar shapes as having the same category. However, these studies often adopt simple categorization tasks and ignore the perceptual dimension (e.g., surface pattern of objects) that likely attract children's attention. The purpose of this study was to test how children categorize when pattern competes against shape. In Experiment 1a children were presented with a target and several testing objects that shared the same shape, color, or texture as the target. The results indicated that children preferentially selected the shape-sharing objects. However, when the texture was replaced by pattern (Experiment 1b), there was no significant difference between shape and pattern choices. When shared features were intricately overlapped between different pairs of stimuli (Experiment 2), children preferentially chose objects that shared patterns over those that shared shapes. These findings are the first to reveal children's pattern preference in categorization, supporting the view that children's categorization is flexible.

Symbols and labels: Children's awareness of social categories in a divided society.

How and when children develop an understanding of group boundaries have implications for conflict resolution. When social divisions are not perceptually distinct, symbols become particularly important. Framed by the Social Identity Development Theory, this study was designed to assess children's categorization of symbols with conflict-related group labels. In Northern Ireland, 218 children (M = 8.14, SD = 1.83, range 5-11 years old) participated in a novel task designed for this study. The sample was evenly split by child gender and community background. Children sorted symbols above chance with both the hypothesized national (i.e., British/Irish) and ethno-political (i.e., Protestant/Catholic) labels, showing a stronger association for the former. Sorting was also stronger for ingroup symbols, compared to outgroup symbols, and increased with age. These findings reflect the potential role that a divided social world has on the development of children's understanding of conflict-related groups. The results also have implications for intergroup relations among children in divided societies.

Preschool children's categorization of speakers by regional accent

AbstractThis study reports on an experiment with twenty preschool children (3;1–4;7) in York, UK to investigate the earliest stage of children's socioperceptual development. The children discriminate between different groups of speakers based on their pronunciation of phonological regional variables diagnostic of the North and South of England. An improvement across the age range uncovers a developmental stage when children are able to interpret variation as socially meaningful. This is comparable with developments in sociolinguistic production during the preschool years, as previous studies have found. Three measures associated with linguistic input (children's age and gender, local versus nonlocal parents) have an impact on the children's performance. The results are interpreted through an exemplar theoretic account, highlighting the role of input and the combined storing and accessing of both linguistic and social information.

Auditory Emotion Word Primes Influence Emotional Face Categorization in Children and Adults, but Not Vice Versa.

In order to assess how the perception of audible speech and facial expressions influence one another for the perception of emotions, and how this influence might change over the course of development, we conducted two cross-modal priming experiments with three age groups of children (6-, 9-, and 12-years old), as well as college-aged adults. In Experiment 1, 74 children and 24 adult participants were tasked with categorizing photographs of emotional faces as positive or negative as quickly as possible after being primed with emotion words presented via audio in valence-congruent and valence-incongruent trials. In Experiment 2, 67 children and 24 adult participants carried out a similar categorization task, but with faces acting as visual primes, and emotion words acting as auditory targets. The results of Experiment 1 showed that participants made more errors when categorizing positive faces primed by negative words versus positive words, and that 6-year-old children are particularly sensitive to positive word primes, giving faster correct responses regardless of target valence. Meanwhile, the results of Experiment 2 did not show any congruency effects for priming by facial expressions. Thus, audible emotion words seem to exert an influence on the emotional categorization of faces, while faces do not seem to influence the categorization of emotion words in a significant way.

Brain MRI Findings in Infantile Spasm: Outcome Correlations in a Patient Cohort

Background: Infantile spasm is a type of pediatric seizure often associated with a negative prognosis. The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in categorization and neurodevelopmental outcomes in children with infantile spasm. Materials and Methods: A retrospective study of the clinical charts and MRI findings of infants diagnosed with infantile spasm between December 2007 and February 2014. Results: A total of 26 children (16 males; 1.6/1) were included: 8 of unknown etiology and 18 with a genetic/structural-metabolic causes. Unknown etiology cases revealed normal brain MRI in 5/8 (62.5%). In the genetic/ structural-metabolic group, only 2/18 (11.1%) had normal imaging. Abnormal imaging findings significantly correlated with genetic/structural-metabolic infantile spasm which had unfavorable neurodevelopmental outcome. Conclusion: Neuroimaging conveys substantial information to the further categorization of children with infantile spasm, providing not only relevant information of the underlying cause but also the prediction of the neurodevelopmental outcome.

Children’s Line Drawings and Object Representation Strategies: Categorization of Children’s Mental Representation Strategies According to the Existing Theories for Object Recognition by Studying Line Drawings

Mental representation of objects deals with understanding the imagery information of concepts and provides clues for design and implementation of computational object recognition strategies. In this study, I postulate that studying of children’s drawings can provide useful information about mental representation of objects in preliminary stage of developmental learning. To this aim, I have designed an experiment in which I asked children of ages 3-4 to draw objects from known categories. Children were also allowed to have a brief view to a prototypical picture of objects for a short period of time. Based on my observation derived from children's drawings, I classified children’s strategies for object representation into three main categories: part-concept, familiar-concept and shape-concept. Results from this experiment suggest that there is a strong link between early object representation and theories of object recognition.

Children's differential weighting of cues to social categories

Two studies investigated the weights of physical similarity, labels, and internal properties in 5-year-olds’ (n=64) categorization and inferences regarding three social categories: gender, race, and shirt-color. Participants saw exemplars of varying degrees of similarity to target categories and were asked to categorize the exemplars and draw inferences about them. Varied across studies was the kind of information pitted against visual similarity – labels (Study 1) or internal information (Study 2). Labels had the weakest effect on children's categorization of the most essentialized category – gender. (Essentialism was assessed independently.) Internal property information dominated physical similarity in determining children's categorization of all three categories. We conclude that essentialized social categories are defined as natural kinds, wherein appearances are indicative of intrinsic essences, and thus information about intrinsic properties – but not labels – can lead children to overlook physical dissimilarity.

Characteristics of Word Categorization in Children with High-Functioning Autism

Objectives: Categorization is identifying and classifying the common features of different objects, which is required to integrate and to process semantic features. It can also help to store and to retrieve words efficiently, and to infer new objects. The purpose of this study is to find the characteristics of semantic information process in high-functioning autism by using categorization preference task and categorization understanding task. Methods: The participants were 12 children with high-functioning autism from the 1st grade to the 3rd grade of elementary school and 12 typically developing children with matching chronological age, IQ, and language level. Children performed categorization preference task and understanding task which composed of perceptual-thematic category conditions and perceptual-taxonomic category conditions. The differences between the groups and conditions were being compared. Results: In the categorization preference task, children with high-functioning autism showed significantly strong preference for perceptual categorization over thematic and taxonomic categorizations as compared with typically developing children. In the categorization understanding task, both the children with high-functioning autism and the typically developing children revealed high performances, and there were no significant differences according to the groups and conditions. Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrated that children with high-functioning autism relied on perceptual characteristics although they have high-levels of knowledge on categorization. These results also suggested that characteristics of information process in children with high-functioning autism could influence the performance of language tasks.

Food Science Education Publications and Websites

Food Science Education Publications and Websites

The relationship between language and social competence in high‐risk preschoolers

PurposeThis research study aims to examine: whether preschoolers at risk form a homogenous or a heterogeneous group of high‐risk children; and in case preschoolers form a heterogeneous group, what are the distinctive characteristics of specific language impairment and mild intellectual disabilities groups in language acquisition and social competence that make differential early intervention necessary.Design/methodology/approachA total of 143 Greek preschoolers aged 4.5 through 5.5 participated in the study. Among them, according to DTLA‐P:3, 42 with mild intellectual disabilities and 41 with specific language impairments were detected. A total of 60 typically developed children were also detected. Children's categorization to the above groups was verified by the Λ‐α‐T‐ω Language Competence Test Level I, which was used to estimate intra‐individual differences in language competence. To assess peer relations, a peer relation checklist was developed and standardized.FindingsThe findings of this study support the approach of the two distinct groups of high‐risk preschoolers in terms of their language and social characteristics.Originality/valueResearch findings highlight the different educational needs of high‐risk preschoolers, which make necessary the differential use of preschool curricula.

The effects of a food project on children's categorization skills

I conducted this study to investigate the effects of project-based education on children's categorization skills. I used an experimental design with the pre and posttest control group. Participants were 47 6-year-old children who attended a public preschool. Children in the experimental group completed a "Food Project", which continued for 12 weeks. The children in the control group undertook the regular preschool program. Data about the children's categorization skills were obtained by using the Categorization Test. While there was no significant difference between the experimental and control groups in the pretest, a significant difference was found in the posttest in favor of the experimental group.

Exploring visual perception and children's interpretations of picture books

Visual perception is an ability to process and organize visual information; it plays a role in identifying and classifying information. Many physiological and psychological factors can have an impact on the depth of visual perception in terms of categorization and interpretation of meaning. Picture books tell stories to children with a combination of texts and images. Children's interaction with picture books shows relationships with visual perception; visual perception has an impact on children's categorization and narratives and illustrations of picture books are works of art that can provide sources for children to appreciate art and enhance their visual perception. Three to five-year-old children are characterized by a reliance on their perception because they see what appears to them. At public libraries, schools, and homes children often read picture books for learning and recreation. Thirty-one three- to five-year-old children from one public library, one preschool, and home schools were recruited to interpret images of two picture books in short interviews. Factors that contributed to their interpretation were explored through surveys, content analysis, and case studies.

Young children category learning: a training study

From an integrative approach, this work focuses on the role of conceptual mechanisms, such as comparison and conceptual-based inference, and sociopragmatic support in young children's taxonomic categorization. “Experiment 1” assessed whether 3-, 4-, and 6-year-old children succeed in detecting taxonomic relations on their own. A clear developmental trend was found: 6-year-olds succeeded, whereas 4- and 3-year-olds relied primarily on perceptually based categories. “Experiment 2” assessed if 3-year-olds are able to change their perceptual response into a taxonomic categorization as a function of the co-occurrence of contingent category information and feedback in an interactive process with an adult (experimenter). A pretest–posttest training study compared 3-year-olds' performance in four conditions: comparison, conceptual-based, information-only, and feedback-only. A perceptual–totaxonomic shift was found only in the comparison and conceptual-based training groups. Children who only received either category information or corrective feedback did not make such a shift. The results show that social interaction with supportive adults is a mechanism that drives conceptual understanding in early childhood.

Effects of categorical labels on similarity judgments: a critical analysis of similarity-based approaches.

Our goal in the present study was to evaluate the claim that category labels affect children's judgments of visual similarity. We presented preschool children with discriminable and identical sets of animal pictures and asked them to make perceptual judgments in the presence or absence of labels. Our findings indicate that children who are asked to make perceptual judgments about identical items judge discriminable items less accurately when making subsequent similarity judgments. Thus, labels do not generally affect children's perceptual similarity judgments; rather, children's reliance on labels to make similarity judgments appears to be attributable to flaws in the methodological approaches used in prior studies. These results have implications for the role of perceptual and conceptual information in children's categorization and induction.

Children’s essentialist reasoning about language and race

Across four studies, we directly compared children's essentialist reasoning about the stability of race and language throughout an individual's lifespan. Monolingual English-speaking children were presented with a series of images of children who were either White or Black; each face was paired with a voice clip in either English or French. Participants were asked which of two adults each target child would grow up to be - one who was a 'match' to the target child in race but not language, and the other a 'match' in language but not race. Nine- to 10-year-old European American children chose the race-match, rather than the language-match. In contrast, 5-6-year-old European American children in both urban, racially diverse, and rural, racially homogeneous environments chose the language-match, even though this necessarily meant that the target child would transform racial categories. Although surprising in light of adult reasoning, these young children demonstrated an intuition about the relative stability of an individual's language compared to her racial group membership. Yet, 5-6-year-old African American children, similar to the older European American children, chose the race-match, suggesting that membership in a racial minority group may highlight children's reasoning about race as a stable category. Theoretical implications for our understanding of children's categorization of human kinds are discussed.