ABSTRACT
Traditional theories of categorization, which focus on the stability of cognition, encouraged developmentalists to seek the best task for uncovering represented categories. However the fact that children's categorizations vary across task has caused disputes about whether naming tasks, similarity judgments or property generalizations are the proper task for studying category representation. In contrast, theories of categorization that recognize the flexibility of cognition have encouraged the comparison of children's categorizations across tasks in an effort to understand the processes and information sources that create categories on line. The present research is motivated by this second framework. We report results from three studies of how 3-year-old's category judgments varied as a function of stimulus properties, task, and information about stimulus objects.
