2004 Volume 22 Issue 2 Pages 151-157
This study examined the information processing of categorizing line-drawn pictures by preschool (6-year-old) children, using a unique version of a Stroop-like picture-picture categorizing task which was used by Tazume (1999). In this task the participants were divided into two groups: a key press reaction group and a verbal reaction group. They were required to respond with the category of the target pictures (animal or fruit) and ignore the distracting pictures. To clarify the effect of semantic relations on the amount of interference, the following combinations of target and distracting pictures were presented: same stimulus (SS), same category (SC), different category (DC), neutral (N), and control (C). To investigate the time course of processing, the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the target and distractor was varied. The results indicated a Stroop-like interference effect in both groups. But the difference between the key press group and verbal reaction group was smaller than that of adults, and both were close to the verbal reaction of adults. These results seem to indicate that the ability of children to select the most effective processing route, according to task demand, is more limited than that of adults.
