Charting children's fruit categories with Markov-Chain Monte Carlo with People

Uncovering how categories develop through childhood is crucial for cognitive science. However, even for simple domains, categories can be complex, making it challenging to access them experimentally, especially in developmental studies. Markov-Chain Monte Carlo with People (MCMCp) is a statistically-based procedure that allows us to elicit category members from participants' implicit categories. However, due to the complexity of the paradigm, MCMCp has been limited to experiments with adult populations. Here, we develop and validate a child-friendly method for applying MCMCp, producing the first MCMCp experiment to elicit category examples from children. Comparing fruit category members for five-year-olds and seven-year-olds, we find generally consistent representative fruits and a developmental progression of initially broad and overlapping fruit categories to more differentiated distributions.