Young children's use of color in classification: Foods and canonically colored objects

Preschoolers seem reluctant to base categories on color. This may be because they have learned that color has low predictive validity for many categories. Exceptions include foods and kinds of objects that have characteristic colors (e.g., fire engines). In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds reliably chose a stick of a characteristic color when prompted with the label of a category whose instances have a characteristic color. They could also name categories whose instances generally share the color of a stick that was used as a cue. In Experiment 2, the same children reliably discriminated between replicas of objects that were painted a normal or an anomalous color. This result was replicated with 2-year-olds in Experiment 3. Thus, children recognize from an early age that color has predictive validity for membership in some categories. In Experiment 4, children were more likely to use color than shape to classify novel items when they thought that these were something to eat. In contrast, they were more likely to use shape when they thought the novel items were something to play with. This suggests that children have formed a general hypothesis about the predictive validity of color for kinds of food.