4 studies investigated the broad claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. In Study 1, 4-7-year-old children were told a story in which a boy was born to one man and adopted by another. The biological father was described as having one set of features (e.g., green eyes) and the adoptive father as having another (e.g., brown eyes). Subjects were asked which man the boy would resemble when he grew up. Preschoolers showed little understanding that selective chains of processes mediate resemblance to parents. It was not until age 7 that children substantially associated the boy with his biological father on physical features and his adoptive father on beliefs. That is, it was not until age 7 that children demonstrated that they understood birth as part of a process selectively mediating the acquisition of physical traits and learning or nurturance as mediating the acquisition of beliefs. In Study 2, subjects were asked whether, as a boy grew up, various of his features could change. Children generally shared our adult intuitions, indicating that their failure in Study 1 was not due to their having a different sense of what features can change. Studies 3 and 4 replicated Study 1, with stories involving mothers instead of fathers and with lessened task demands. Taken together, the results of the 4 studies refute the claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. The findings are discussed in terms of whether children understand biology as an autonomous cognitive domain.

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Two studies explore conceptual change in the acquisition of wine expertise. In Experiment 1, tasters described a set of wines. Experts described the wines using more specific features than did intermediates, who, in turn, used more specific features than did novices. Specificity in describing wines was not related to discrimination performance on a psychophysical test. A regression analysis indicated that the features identified by the expert as well as those identified by the nonexpert tasters covaried with grape type, such that wines of the same grape were described more similarly than were wines of different grapes. In Experiment 2, the same tasters sorted the wines into clusters. Experts, unlike nonexperts, tended to sort the wines explicitly by grape type. Moreover, the features of the wines (described by the tasters in Experiment 1) covaried significantly better by the experts' clusters than they did by the nonexperts' clusters. Indeed, the features identified by the nonexperts covaried significantly worse when the wines were clustered by their own sortings than they did when the wines were clustered by actual grape type. It is suggested that the acquisition of wine expertise, a domain that is at once conceptual and perceptual, entails not only a greater differentiation of features but also a restructuring of the explicit schemes of classification.Once we grant that there are such things as experts and that they are, within their worlds, different from novices, we are led to ask just how profoundly different they are. Might they have undergone the kind of conceptual change described by students of the history of science and conceptual development (

4 studies investigated the broad claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. In Study 1, 4-7-year-old children were told a story in which a boy was born to one man and adopted by another. The biological father was described as having one set of features (e.g., green eyes) and the adoptive father as having another (e.g., brown eyes). Subjects were asked which man the boy would resemble when he grew up. Preschoolers showed little understanding that selective chains of processes mediate resemblance to parents. It was not until age 7 that children substantially associated the boy with his biological father on physical features and his adoptive father on beliefs. That is, it was not until age 7 that children demonstrated that they understood birth as part of a process selectively mediating the acquisition of physical traits and learning or nurturance as mediating the acquisition of beliefs. In Study 2, subjects were asked whether, as a boy grew up, various of his features could change. Children generally shared our adult intuitions, indicating that their failure in Study 1 was not due to their having a different sense of what features can change. Studies 3 and 4 replicated Study 1, with stories involving mothers instead of fathers and with lessened task demands. Taken together, the results of the 4 studies refute the claim that preschoolers understand biological inheritance. The findings are discussed in terms of whether children understand biology as an autonomous cognitive domain.