development of child follows a fixed sequence . support this statement with two examples
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Abstract
Multiple levels of category inclusiveness in 4 object domains (animals, vehicles, fruit, and furniture) were examined using a sequential touching procedure and assessed in both individual and group analyses in 80 12-, 18-, 24-, and 30-month-olds. The roles of stimulus discriminability and child motor development, fatigue, and actions were also investigated. More inclusive levels of categorization systematically emerged before less inclusive levels, and a consistent advantage for categorizing high versus low perceptual contrasts was found. Group and individual analyses generally converged, but individual analyses added information about child categorization over group analyses. The development of object categorization in young children is discussed in light of efficiency of processing and similarity/differentiation theories.
Object Categories and their Hierarchical Inclusiveness
Generally speaking, categories mediate our interactions with the world (Smith, 1989) insofar as they structure and clarify perception and cognition (Bornstein, 1984; Harnad, 1987). The environment affords an infinite variety of stimulation and is incessantly changing. Moreover, we experience the world out of a constant biological flux. Both these major sources of variation must be reduced if perception and cognition are to proceed with organization, order, and coherence. Categorization contributes to rendering comprehensible this otherwise bewildering diversity, allowing us to generalize across experiences, because categorization relates each experienced entity to an extant representation (Smith & Medin, 1981). Categorization also facilitates the storage and retrieval of information, and it supplies a principle of organization by which new information can be banked efficiently in memory. In this way, categorization implies an elementary kind of inference and allows the categorizer to respond to novel entities as if they were familiar. Object categories refer to shared representations of like, but discriminable, objects. Object categorization conveys knowledge of other object properties as well as knowledge of properties of category members not yet encountered (Baldwin, Markman, & Melartin, 1993; Greco, Hayne, & Rovee-Collier, 1990; Mandler, 1998, 2000). In brief, categorizing is an essential cognitive and developmental achievement, but also presents a formidable cognitive and developmental challenge.
Categories are especially valuable in infancy and early childhood when many new objects, events, and people are encountered because, without the ability and proclivity to categorize, children would have to learn to respond anew to each novel entity they experience (Bornstein, 1984; Rakison & Oakes, 2003). In this sense, insights into how categorization initially develops are fundamental to understanding children’s cognitions as well as other emerging related mental functions, such as memory and language (e.g., Mareschal, Powell, & Volein, 2003). In consequence, the need to understand more about the early development of categorization is patent, substantive, and compelling.
Two views on categorization complement one another. One emphasizes processing, and the other focuses on structure. In terms of processing, entities in the world can be categorized in different ways: The objects, events, and people that we encounter every day are not each bound into a single category, but can be situated into different categories. Adults flexibly categorize the same entities in different ways in response to changing instructions, contexts, and task demands (Schyns & Rodet, 1997). So do young children. As children become familiar with the objects in a task they can change their categorizations (Oakes, Plumert, Lansink, & Merryman, 1996); whether children form a category that includes or excludes certain exemplars depends on the distribution of exemplars they are exposed to (Bornstein, Kessen, & Weiskopf, 1976; French, Mermillod, Quinn, & Mareschal, 2001; Hund & Plumert, 2005; Oakes & Ribar, 2005). Different properties of category entities (prototype exemplars or not, exemplars presented singly or in pairs) shape children’s categorical responding (Bauer, Dow, & Hertzgaard, 1995; Mareshal & Tan, 2007; Oakes, Coppage, & Dingel, 1997; Younger & Furrer, 2003), and children can shift from categorizing a set of stimuli using one dimension to categorizing the same stimuli using a different dimension (Ellis & Oakes, 2006). Jones and Smith (1993) succinctly argued this dynamic process view of categorization, asserting that categories are “emergent products of multiple knowledge sources in specific task contexts” (p. 136). However, categorization is not totally, always, or only ad hoc.