Do Children Profit From Looking Beyond Looks? From Similarity-Based to Cue Abstraction Processes in Multiple-Cue Judgment

摘要

The authors investigated the ability of 9- to 11-year-olds and of adults to use similarity-based and rule-based processes as a function of task characteristics in a task that can be considered either acategorization task or a multiple-cue judgment task, depending on the nature of the criterion (binary vs.continuous). Both children and adults relied on similarity-based processes in the categorization task.However, adults relied on cue abstraction in the multiple-cue judgment task, whereas the majority ofchildren continued to rely on similarity-based processes. Reliance on cue abstraction resulted in betterjudgments for adults but not for children in the multiple-cue judgment task. This suggests that 9- to11-year-olds may have defaulted to similarity-based processes because they were not able to employ acue abstraction process efficiently.