Preschoolers' ability to classify pairs of photographs of animate and inanimate animals that are the same or different kind

Brenneman, Zuza and Gelman (unpublished,2003) demonstrated that 3- and 4-year-old children could classify pairs of photographs of real and fabricated copies of animate objects into the correct animate and inanimate category. In their experiment, each pair consisted of photographs of a real and an artificial version of the same animal (i.e., a real and an artificial dog, a real and an artificial rabbit, etc). Here we label this Control condition. In the present follow-up Experimental condition, we sample stimuli from the Control study, but decreased the surface similarity of the pairs. To do this we assigned photo of real animal with randomly selected fake animal pictures. As a result, no pair of real-fake animal photos looked alike. Fifteen 3-year-old and fifteen 4-year-old children participated in the present study and results from the previous experiment was used as a Control comparison condition. Results showed that there was no significant difference between the present experiment and the previous experiment for both age groups (p=0.208). Still, inspection of the distributions of the 3- year-old children’s performance, there was a tendency that the context of similarity facilitates three year old children’s biological categorization.M.S.Includes bibliographical referencesby Shuqi Yan