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The Role of Stimulus Novelty on Children's Inflexible Dimensional Switching
Author(s) -
JowkarBaniani Gelareh,
Schmuckler Mark A.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/cdev.12212
Subject(s) - novelty , psychology , stimulus (psychology) , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , social psychology
Children's ability to flexibly shift attention between different representational schemes was investigated using the dimensional change card sorting task. Across three experiments ( N = 56 three‐year‐olds and N = 40 four‐year‐olds in [Section 2. Experiment 1: Perceptual Similarity of the Task Material]; N = 14 three‐year‐olds in [Section 9. Experiment 2: Saliency of the Perceptual Manipulations]; and N = 14 three‐year‐olds in [Section 14. Experiment 3: Manipulating Task‐Irrelevant Features Only]) the role of perceptual information on children's cognitive flexibility was investigated by manipulating different aspects of the task materials between pre‐ and postswitch phases. Better performance was observed when either task‐relevant (the color or shape of the images on the cards) or task‐irrelevant information (the background color or shape of the actual cards) was changed, with this improvement occurring when the changes were salient enough to induce a stimulus novelty effect.