Flexibility of Categorization 1 Flexibility of Categorization in Children and Adults

Categorization is treating two or more discriminable entities as equivalent. Cognitive psychologists typically study categorization by looking at sorting, labelling, identification, and membership judgments. However, categorization includes any behavior that is generalized across several different entities or items. Flexibility of categorization is categorizing entity [a] with set [X] on one occasion, and with a different set [Y] on another occasion. Flexibility can be distinguished from stochastic errors in categorization if recategorizations do not occur randomly but are predicted by pre-specified variables and forces. These forces affect both the likelihood and nature of recategorizations. Because research and theory of categorization has seldom focused on flexibility, there are several outstanding questions regarding flexibility and recategorization: What is the evidence of flexibility in human categorization? What variables govern recategorization? Are there substantial changes in the flexibility of categorization from early childhood to adulthood? This last question is important because an examination of the development of flexible categorization will address question such as, To what extent does flexible categorization rely on extensive factual knowledge? Before addressing these questions, however, it is necessary to delve into some thorny theoretical issues in order to frame these questions and establish the importance of flexible categorization. What is most noticeable about flexibility is its underrepresentation in both theory and research. In cognitive psychology the modal description of concepts and categories 2 is fairly uniform. 2 Most authors use these terms interchangably (assuming that "categories" refers to mental categories), leading one to wonder whether concepts and categories are the same or different. In fact, concepts are sometimes viewed as subsets of categories. That is, a concept is a singular representation of a unitary entity, and a psychological category is either a concept or a group of concepts. For example, the category "dog" refers to the concept "dog," but the category "animal" refers to the concepts "dog," "cat," "horse," etc. Other authors treat concepts as mental abstractions of objectively existing categories. Both distinctions are vague and vagarious, and I therefore will use the terms interchangeably. This decision is of no real consequence for my purposes. Similarly,