Conceptual Development

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with how children acquire conceptual knowledge and how domains themselves may emerge as a consequence of learning and development. I organize the material using a theoretical framework that includes three important aspects to human concepts. First, there is the ability to form categories (or equivalence classes of discriminable entities) by focusing on commonalities and abstracting away differences. Second, there is the ability to lexicalize some of these categories and use the word in reference to an individual and the entire class. Third, there is the ability to use words as knowledge hubs for accumulating knowledge about these lexicalized categories, and subsequently form more abstract categories and make predictions. I argue that the ability to form categories is shared with other mammals and perhaps with other vertebrates, whereas the latter two abilities are uniquely human. Finally, I consider the basic ability to learn and use categories as well as the ability to form and use lexicalized concepts serving as knowledge hubs.

Age-related differences in creative cognition: The mediating role of executive functions and associative processes.

“…Therefore, differences in accessing information in long-term memory contributed to explaining age-related differences in convergent and divergent creativity. Changes in semantic knowledge, both in the quantity and quality of associative links, as well as in the organization of conceptual representations vary markedly during development (Bjorklund, 1987; Sloutsky, 2015). As experience and knowledge increase, representations and associations between related concepts gain in complexity, favoring their semantic integration.…”

Categorical Learning and the Cognitive Foundations of Language Evolution and Development

“…Starting in early infancy, infants display a rudimentary capacity to form categories (Deng & Sloutsky, 2015;Sloutsky & Deng, 2019). Infants first perceptually identify units constituting situations, entities, and events, which are then sorted into first conceptual categories by generalizing over individual instances (Hard, Tversky & Lang, 2006;Sloutsky, 2015). Within their first year of life, infants learn to establish early categories of events and objects that are sufficiently perceptually distinguishable, such as BOTTLE, DOG, RUN and SLEEP.…”

“…One potential pathway towards these early abstractions is that children categorize perceptual input into prototypically structured image schemas, such as cause-motion, animate-motion, and self-motion (Mandler, 1992(Mandler, , 2004, based on the natural statistics of their (re)-occurence in the world. These image schemas serve as the conceptual primitives on which conceptual categories of animacy, inanimacy, and agency are constructed (Sloutsky, 2015). However, other categories might develop in tandem with and influenced by language.…”

Categorical Details in the Context of Educational Wooden Toys: Comparisons of Similarities and Differences for Jigsaw and Puzzle

“…Bu bağlamda, çocuk gelişimi ve eğitimi (Landreth, 1972;Bilir, 1979;Senemoğlu, 2007), okul öncesi dönem (Oktay, 2004;Yavuzer, 2005), zeka ve özel yetenek (Sattler, 1982), çoklu zeka kuramı (Gardner, 1993), bilişsel gelişim (Olson, 1970), problem çözme becerilerinin gelişimi (Zembat ve Unutkan, 2005), kavramsal gelişim (Sloutsky, 2015), davranış ve gelişim (McCandless, 1967), algısal gelişim ve motor gelişimi (Cratty, 1979), motor gelişim (Gallahue, 1982;Özer ve Özer, 2009;Ristic ve Enns, 2015), okul öncesi dönemde oyun ve oyuncak (Bruner vd., 1976;Rubin vd., 1983;Poyraz, 1999;Oğuzkan ve Avcı, 2000;Jackman vd., 2014) gibi temalarla gerçekleştirilen araştırmalar bunlardan bazılarıdır. Usta (2018) tarafından bahsedildiği gibi, özellikleri ve göstergeleriyle çocukluğa yön veren gelişim dönemleri ele alındığında, , Anal Dönem (24-36 ay), Fallik Dönem (36-60 ay) ve Latent Dönem'in ilk yılı (60-72 ay) olmak üzere] oyuncaklar yordamıyla öğrenmeyi ve keşfetmeyi ihtiva eden 0-6 yaş (0-72 ay) arasındaki okul öncesi dönem, [Psikomotor Gelişim, Bilişsel Gelişim, Dil Gelişimi, Sosyal ve (Usta, 2018;2020b) ve Yapboz kategorisi oyuncakları (Usta, 2016;2018;2020b) kategorik olarak aşağıdaki gibi detaylandırılabilir.…”