Looking Inside Children’s Social Inferences

Tess N. Young

Abstract

Humans can be categorized in a number of different ways. Inferences are predictions that are made about unfamiliar items, based upon one’s prior category knowledge. Not only do adults need to be able to make these judgments, but children do as well. This paper focuses on two factors that children may base these predictions upon. Category distinctiveness is the degree to which membership in a category is rare (Nelson & Miller, 1995). Category coherence is the degree to which members in a category are similar to one another (Patalano, Chin-Parker, & Ross, 2006). This paper focuses not only on utilizing these mechanisms for making inferences, but also the influence that both of these have on one’s memory. Results show that young children do not utilize distinctiveness, but do utilize coherence when making inferences, while adults utilize both of these. Results also show that young children do not show memory for either distinctiveness or coherence, but that adults do.