Conceptual flexibility in school children: Switching between taxonomic and thematic relations

Abstract

Conceptual flexibility is the skill of categorizing a single object in different ways on separate occasions (e.g. first taxonomically: DOG-COW, and then thematically:DOG-DOGHOUSE). This skill contributes to the efficient organization of information and to adaptive behavior. Although several studies have tested whether children can categorize objects perceptually, thematically and taxonomically, few have explored if they can apply different categorization criteria to the same set of objects. This study, therefore, presents two experimental tasks conducted to assess conceptual flexibility in 6-to 11-year-old-primary school children from Mar del Plata, Argentina. Findings indicate that conceptual flexibility increases at age 10-11 in the task with the greater executive demand (multiple free sorting -MFS-) and both in 8-9 and 10-11 age groups in the task withthe lesser executive demand (triple forced choice -TFC-), thanks to the appearance of taxonomic responses. Thematic relations proved to be especially prominent and influential; and during much of childhood, superordinate taxonomic knowledge remains inaccessible in comparison to thematic knowledge.