INFLUENCE OF A PREFERENCE FOR ANALYTIC CATEGORIZATION UPON CONCEPT ACQUISITION1

Cognitive activity involves at least three different processes that generally occur in the following sequence: the initial categorization of external information, the storage of encoded information, and the imposing of transformations upon the encoded data. The specific categorizations and transformations are governed, of course, by the nature of the problem. Students of cognitive development have often assumed that the striking differences between the cognitive products of children of different ages (or among children of the same age) were attributable to differences in the availability of the rules of reasoning and mediational diversity. Thus, the superior performances of older, in contrast to younger, children on problem tasks is assumed to reflect the generally greater knowledge repertoire of the older children. This supposition is both reasonable and empirically verified. It is not surprising, therefore, that psychologists have not entertained seriously the possibility that other factors may contribute to age and individual differences in cognitive products. Specifically, there has been a tendency to neglect the relevance of interindividual differences in the processing of information --differences in the kinds of stimuli that are initially selected for labeling. For it appears that children and adults do have a preference hierarchy with respect to the stimulus characteristics they will initially attend to in situations where the individual has several degrees of freedom. One relevant variable that describes a mode of information processing involves the classical dimension of analytic vs. nonanalytic (i.e., nondifferen