Causal status effect in children's categorization Woo-kyoung Ahn a, * , Susan A. Gelman b , Jennifer A. Amsterlaw b , Jill Hohenstein c , Charles W. Kalish d a Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 534 Wilson Hall, Nashville, TN 37240, USA b University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA c Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA d University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA Received 29 October 1999; received in revised form 11 January 2000; accepted 17 March 2000 Abstract The current study examined the causal status effect (weighing cause features more than effect features in categorization) in children. Adults (Study 1) and 7±9-year-old children (Study 2) learned descriptions of novel animals, in which one feature caused two other features. When asked to determine which transfer item was more likely to be an example of the animal they had learned, both adults and children preferred an animal with a cause feature and an effect feature rather than an animal with two effect features. This study is the ®rst direct demonstration of the causal status effect in children. q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Concept learning; Causal reasoning; Cognition; Development 1. Introduction When children categorize objects or make use of concepts, they value some features more than others. For instance, Gelman (1988) found that second-graders are more likely to generalize internal parts of an animal (e.g. a spleen inside a rabbit), than functional features (e.g. `you can loll with it'), to other instances of the same kind. Similarly, Keil (1989) demonstrated that fourth-graders base deci- sions about an animal's category membership on its origin (e.g. being born from W. Ahn et al. / Cognition 76 (2000) B35±B43 B35 Cognition 76 (2000) B35±B43 www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit 0010-0277/00/$ - see front matter q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0010-0277(00)00077-9 COGNITION * Corresponding author. Fax: 11-615-343-8449. E-mail address: woo-kyoung.ahn@vanderbilt.edu (W. Ahn).