We consider young children's construals of biological phenomena and the forces that shape them, using Carey's (1985) category-based induction task that demonstrated anthropocentric reasoning in young urban children. Follow-up studies (including our own) have questioned the generality of her results, but they have employed quite different procedures and either have not included urban children or, when urban samples were included, have failed to reproduce her original findings. In the present study of 4-10-year-olds from three cultural communities, our procedures followed Carey's more closely and replicated her findings with young urban children. However, they yielded quite different results for young rural European American and young rural Native American children. These results underscore the importance of a complex interaction of culture and experience--including both dayto-day interactions with the natural world and sensitivity to the belief systems of the communities--in children's reasoning about the natural world.An important focus in the cognitive sciences is to identify how knowledge develops and how it is shaped by experience. Within this tradition, the domain of naïve biology --commonsense reasoning about biological phenomena --has attracted considerable interest. In a now classic study, Carey (1985) proposed that naïve biology is a distinct module, but one that is not acquired until sometime after age 6-7. This proposal has had a powerful impact but has also engendered controversy focused on how best to interpret the developmental data (Carey, 1995;Inagaki & Hatano, 2002) and the implications for broader issues, including how we reason about the relation between human beings and the rest of nature. Here we engage these issues but focus especially on the contributions of culture and experience in children's reasoning about the biological world.Although issues of culture and experience have been addressed in other work (including our own), previous studies have a potentially serious limitation---their procedures have differed rather substantially from Carey's original methodology. Consequentially, failures to replicate
In spite of evidence for cultural variation in adult concepts of the biological world (i.e., folkbiological thought), research regarding the influence of culture on children's concepts is mixed, and cultural influences on many aspects of early folkbiological thought remain underexplored. Previous research has shown that there are cultural differences in ecological reasoning and psychological closeness to nature between Menominee Native American and rural European American adults (e.g., Medin et al., 2006;Bang et al., 2007). In the present research we examined whether these cultural concepts are available at 5-7 years of age. We conducted structured interviews in which each child viewed several pairs of pictures of plants and nonhuman animals and were asked how or why the species (e.g., raspberries and strawberries) might go together. We found that Menominee children were more likely than European American children to mention ecological relations and psychological closeness to nature, and that they were also more likely to mimic the non-human species. There were no differences between the two communities in the number of children's responses based on taxonomic and morphological relations. Implications for the design of science curricula are discussed.
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