The effects of self-instruction on preschool children's sorting of generalized in-common tasks

Three normal preschool children were presented with a sorting task ordinarily insoluble by 4-year-olds, based on the visual discrimination of what features two sample stimuli had in common. Failing to sort correctly according to that criterion, they were then presented with task-analytic conditions in which they learned to name correctly the common features of pairs of such stimuli and to sort correctly according to experimenter-named common attributes. This proved insufficient in producing correct sorting, even when the children were asked to name what the stimuli had in common and did so correctly just before they were asked to sort. The children were then asked to self-instruct: The experimenter said, "So, what are you looking for?" just before the children began to sort in response to the experimenter's presentation of two sample stimuli. This condition typically yielded correct answers to the question and correct sorting, which proved reversible if the experimenter discontinued the question or asked the child to not ask or answer what the two stimuli had in common, just before sorting. The self-instructional effect was found to generalize to new sets of visual stimuli and to a novel experimenter.