Representational Shifts in Children Aged 6 to 9

The experiment tested the hypothesis regarding the influence of categorical labels on image memory in children aged 6–9 years. Previous literature describes the effect of representational shift, which manifests as impaired recognition of individual objects after categorisation compared to a non-categorisation task. This effect has been observed in adults and, according to the dominant explanation is driven by an attentional shift towards category-relevant features influenced by labels. To understand the mechanisms of this effect, data on its age-related variations are necessary to be obtained. Following this explanation – within the framework of the cultural-historical approach – we expect that changes in recognition performance with age should differ between the condition with a category label and the condition without it. To test this hypothesis, we replicated an experiment previously conducted on adults with child participants and additionally assessed individual differences in participants' verbal flexibility. Children aged 6 to 9 years (N = 33) participated in the experiment which consisted of two stages: a task stage and a test stage. During the task stage children completed a classification task and a preference assessment task. In the test phase we examined how well the children remembered the images from the first stage. As a result, we observed the effect of representational shift in children: the number of correct detections and the sensitivity (d’) were lower in the classification task compared to the preference assessment task. Thus, the hypothesis regarding age-related differences in the manifestation of the effect was confirmed. However, no individual differences were found in the relationship between the representational shift effect and verbal flexibility.

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