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In spite of increasing interest regarding categorization activities in developmental psychology and Piaget's influence on this research, few studies have been devoted to multiple classification tasks, particularly with regard to how subjects extract information from a table. In a first experiment, 68 children 8- to 9-year-old, were tested using 6 tables, differing only on location of class criterion modalities. Essentially two strategies (spatial and conceptual) were used by children to organize the properties set, corresponding to each cell of the table. The second experiment, with younger (7-8 years old) and older children (11-12 years old), showed a developmental evolution in the preference given by subjects to the spatial vs conceptual stategies. Whereas 7- to 8-year-olds used significantly in majority a spatial strategy (the same path used for naming pertinent modalities) in preference to a conceptual one (the same order on class criteria), 11- to 12-year-olds, showed the inverse pattern. These results are discussed in terms of within- subject processes vs between-subjects processes, action and symbolic systems roles in knowledge constructions and selective attention processes.
