Department of Psychology, New York University, NY, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2010 Sep;46(5):1078-88. doi: 10.1037/a0020207.
Recent research has suggested that young children have relatively well-developed trait concepts. However, this literature overlooks potential age-related differences in children's appreciation of the fundamentally dimensional nature of traits. In Study 1, we presented 4-, 5-, and 7-year-old children and adults with sets of characters and asked them to indicate the preferences of a target character who shared appearance attributes with one character (appearance match) and shared a common trait with the other character (trait match). Traits were presented in a way that emphasized either their categorical or their dimensional nature. When the dimensional nature of trait terms was emphasized, the youngest children made fewer trait-based inferences, and the use of traits increased with age. In Study 2, we gave 4-year-old children and adults the same task except that the extent to which appearance cues could serve as a meaningful basis of judgment was varied. Results were consistent with the findings of Study 1, although children were more likely to rely on dimensional presentations of traits in the absence of strong appearance cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).
最近的研究表明，幼儿已经具有相对发达的特质概念。然而，这一文献忽略了儿童对特质基本维度性质的理解可能存在与年龄相关的差异。在研究 1 中，我们向 4 岁、5 岁和 7 岁的儿童和成年人展示了一系列角色，并要求他们指出一个与一个角色（外貌匹配）具有相同外貌属性的目标角色的偏好，以及与另一个角色（特质匹配）具有相同特质的目标角色的偏好。特质以强调其类别或维度性质的方式呈现。当强调特质术语的维度性质时，最小的孩子做出的特质推理较少，并且随着年龄的增长，使用特质的频率增加。在研究 2 中，我们向 4 岁的儿童和成年人提供了相同的任务，只是判断的外貌线索可以作为有意义的依据的程度有所不同。研究结果与研究 1 的发现一致，尽管在没有强烈的外貌线索的情况下，儿童更有可能依赖于特质的维度呈现。（心理学文摘数据库记录（c）2010 APA，保留所有权利）。
