Two studies examined the conditions under which 6-year-old children succeeded in
discovering prototypical information within ill-defined categories for fictitious
animals that had salient individuating properties. Following either incidental or
intentional learning of a single category, children attended to both prototypical
and instance-specific features when judging the category membership of new examples
(Experiment 1). When the same category was contrasted with a similar category in a
sorting-with-feedback procedure, children relied on prototypical features in
categorisation despite the fact that instance-specific features dominated their
recognition-memory judgements (Experiment 2). The results show young children to be
capable of shifting their attention to different kinds of category attributes
according to the conditions of category formation and the nature of the assessment task.
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