Abstract
This study examines how preschool children use information about categories in counting dissimilar objects. In Studies 1-4, similar to Gelman and Tucker's (1975) experiment, 5- and 6- year-old participants were asked to count objects falling into two categories. Children of both ages tended to count all objects together in the first three studies but not in Study 4, where different instructions were given to the children. Comparing the results from Studies 1-3 with the result for Study 4, it is argued that task setting (i.e., questions such as “How many things are there?”) can influence the tendency to ignore categorical distinctions. Study 5 was conducted to investigate whether contextual information influences preschoolers' use of categories. In a task of distributing fruits between five stuffed toys, 5- and 6-year-olds were given three kinds of fruits (strawberries, grapes, oranges) and one kind of vegetable (Japanese radishes). While many of the 6-year-olds provided equal quantities of each category, the 5-year-olds tended to only employ the categories in organizing how they carried out their counts for the total number of objects. Thus, although 6-year-olds used information about categories in deciding “what to count”, the 5-year-olds merely used categories to accurately estimate the total number of objects.
