Use of Perceptual and Categorical Attributes of Instances in Matching and Nonmatching Tasks

144 younger (mean age of 4:8) and 144 older (mean age of 6:0) kindergarten children were trained on a matching or a nonmatching task which could be solved by using either perceptual or categorical attributes of instances and were given the probe tasks three times at different levels of training (4/4, 8/8, and 8/8 + 16) to assess which attribute they had learned in the matching or the nonmatching task. The main results in the probe tasks were as follows: (a) the percentage of perceptual learners was greater on the similar category set (fruit vs, vegetable) than on the dissimilar category set (fruit vs. musical instrument), (b) the percentage of categorical learners was greater on the dissimilar set than on the similar set, (c) the interaction of task and set was significant at the criterion of 4/4 for perceptual and categorical learners, which showed that performance differences due to the similarity of categories were greater for the matching task than for the nonmatching task, and (d) for the older children the percentage of categorical learners increased on the dissimilar set with training while that of inconsistent learners decreased.