Numerous studies have shown that children tend to view objects with similar shapes as having the same category. However, these studies often adopt simple categorization tasks and ignore the perceptual dimension (e.g., surface pattern of objects) that likely attract children's attention. The purpose of this study was to test how children categorize when pattern competes against shape. In Experiment 1a children were presented with a target and several testing objects that shared the same shape, color, or texture as the target. The results indicated that children preferentially selected the shape‐sharing objects. However, when the texture was replaced by pattern (Experiment 1b), there was no significant difference between shape and pattern choices. When shared features were intricately overlapped between different pairs of stimuli (Experiment 2), children preferentially chose objects that shared patterns over those that shared shapes. These findings are the first to reveal children's pattern preference in categorization, supporting the view that children's categorization is flexible.

中文翻译：

---

在复杂的分类过程中，儿童更喜欢图案而不是形状。

大量研究表明，儿童倾向于观看具有相同类别的相似形状的物体。但是，这些研究通常采用简单的分类任务，而忽略了可能引起儿童注意力的感知维度（例如物体的表面图案）。这项研究的目的是测试当图案与形状竞争时儿童如何分类。在实验1a中，向孩子展示了一个目标以及几个与目标具有相同形状，颜色或纹理的测试对象。结果表明，儿童优先选择形状共享对象。但是，当纹理被图案替换时（实验1b），形状和图案选择之间没有显着差异。当共享的特征在不同的刺激对之间错综复杂地重叠时（实验2），儿童优先选择共享模式的对象，而不是共享形状的对象。这些发现首次揭示了儿童在分类中的模式偏好，支持了儿童分类的灵活性的观点。