A Comparison of Infants’ Categorization in Paired and Successive Presentation Familiarization Tasks
Lisa M. Oakes
Department of Psychology, University of Iowa
Rebecca J. Ribar
Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

Three experiments directly compared infants’ categorization in variations of the visual familiarization task. In each experiment, 4- or 6-month-old infants were familiarized with a collection of dogs or cats and then their response to novel dogs and cats was assessed. In Experiment 1, 4-month-old infants responded to the exclusive distinction of dogs or cats when tested in a paired-comparison task. In Experiments 2 and 3, 6-month-old infants, but not 4-month-old infants, responded to this same distinction in a successive presentation task, even when the amount of familiarization was equated to that of the paired comparison task. Therefore, familiarization with a particular set of stimuli does not induce infants to respond to a single category but rather they respond to different categories depending on features of the task.