Salience or Centrality: Why Do Some Features Influence Inductive Generalization More Than Others?

This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature-specifically, a creature's head-by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are consistent with cues provided by attentional capture (Deng & Sloutsky, 2012, 2013). However, prior research indicates that heads are special features of entities (Nelson, 2001; Quinn, Eimas, & Tarr, 2001) and that some features of categories guide judgments more than others (Gelman & Wellman, 1991). Thus, it is unclear when feature salience versus feature centrality guides inductive inferences. To clarify this, in Experiment 1, children and adults were presented with stimuli that focused both feature centrality and salience on the same feature (a moving head) and asked to perform classification and induction tasks. In Experiment 2, participants completed the same tasks after they were presented with stimuli that decoupled these effects (moving hands and static heads). These experiments revealed that both feature centrality and feature salience exercised separable influences on children's inductive inferences. Critically, heads powerfully influenced children's inductions, whether they were moving or not. This outcome suggests that prior findings were provoked by combining feature salience and centrality, and not elicited by manipulations of feature salience alone. These results are discussed with respect to the labels-as-features debate and in the broader context of the increasingly psychophysical nature of studies exploring children's conceptual development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).