Effects Of Comparison And Location Picture Priming On Category Learning Of Location Relationships In Children Aged 4-6 Years

A relationship category formed by the members having a common relationship.Mastering relationships is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence and one of the most important abilities that distinguish humans from other species.At present,the age developmental characteristics of children relationship category learning are not clear.There has been a controversy about whether children of different ages are based on perceptual similarity or on relational categories,and what trends exist.Some studies have found that comparison improves to learn relationship category,but it is not clear whether comparison also helps children learn relationship category.It is also necessary to further explore how to help children to learn relationship category,and whether there are better training methods.In addition,there are some deficiencies in experimental materials and experimental design in the existing researches on positional relation category learning,which also make the research results inconsistent.Therefore,it is necessary to further explore children’s relation category learning by improving the research materials and designs.In order to explore how children learn about the positional relation category,and whether comparison and the starting of position picture can help children to learn the positional relation category.This study designed three experiments.In experiment 1,children aged 4-6 were selected as subjects and age was taken as the inter-subject variable to investigate the developmental characteristics of children in positional relation category learning.The experimental materials were modified and improved on the experimental materials of Pavlova(2017).The experimental results show that4-year-olds are more inclined to choose shape matching,6-year-olds are moreinclined to choose position relation matching,and 5-year-olds are in the transition period from shape similarity classification to position relation classification.In experiment 2,4-and 5-year-old children were selected as subjects,and comparison terms were added.2(age: 4,5)x2(with or without comparison: with comparison or without comparison)was adopted as the inter-subject design,to investigate whether increased comparison can promote children to choose the matching of position relation in the category learning of position relation.The experimental results show that the comparison has a promoting effect on the selection of positional relation matching in both 4-and 5-year-old children.In experiment 3,4-year-old children were taken as subjects,and position picture priming was added,and whether or not position picture priming was taken as an inter-subject variable,to further investigate whether position picture priming could help 4-year-old children improve their performance in position relation category learning.The experimental results showed that the priming of position pictures could better promote the learning of position relation category of 4-year-olds.In addition,by analyzing children’s oral report,it was found that at the baseline level,4-year-olds not only tended to be classified according to shape similarity,but also showed more attention to the local features(shape features and functional features)of animals,and more 6-year-olds could find the same positional relationship.Under the condition of comparison,more 5-year-old children can make inductive reasoning to the experimental materials given;Under the condition of starting the position picture,the 4-year old children reported more keywords related to the content of the starting picture,and could better find the position relation and carry out the position relation matching.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)Children’s learning of the category of positional relationship changes from shape matching to location matching.To be specific,4-year-old children are more likely to choose shape similarity,6-year-old children are more likely to choose position relation,and 5-year-old children are in a transition period from shape similarity classification to position relation classification.(2)Providing comparison can promote the selection of positional relationshipmatching by 4-and 5-year-olds.(3)Providing priming of position pictures can better promote 4-year-olds to learn the category of location relationships.(4)The analysis of the oral report shows that: under the baseline condition,4-year-olds tend to pay more attention to the shape and function of animals.Under the condition of comparison,5-year-olds children choose more position relation than4-year-olds children,and can carry on inductive reasoning.Under the influence of residual attention,4-year-olds reported more content related to image activation.