ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the developmental work on perceived structure, to provide a progress report of efforts, and summarizes findings that bear on some of the unresolved issues. The role of attention in learning has, of course, been debated extensively. The major developmental issues have centered on the importance of attention in contributing to age-related performance differences in discriminative transfer and selective learning. Differences in the perceived structure of integral and separable dimensions are shown by comparing performances on the one-dimension and correlated-dimensions tasks. According to the separability hypothesis, there should be an age by task interaction for subjects who sorted with color and form. The differences in perceived structure between integral and separable stimuli are also shown clearly by the results of restricted classification. The young child’s bias toward overall similarity relations among objects can be attributed to several perceptual factors.
