The reliance on inclusive living thing in inductive inference among 5-year-olds: the role of access to nature and the size of receptive vocabulary

Abstract

The present study employed a serial forced choice inductive inference paradigm to test whether rural and urban 5-year-olds varying in SES rely on the representation of living things in extending new knowledge. Sixty-five children learned that humans possess a novel internal property and, in a series of test trials, had to decide whether to attribute the property to an inanimate living thing or to an artifact. Additionally, the size of children's receptive vocabulary was assessed. This study provides the first evidence that those 5-year-olds who have access to rich nature and who have acquired a high level of receptive vocabulary do rely on living kinds in induction in a forced choice task. The study further underscores the necessity to include children with diverse backgrounds in research on the development of biological knowledge. It also provides new evidence that general cognitive ability links to advances in children's biological understanding.

Young Children’s Inductive Inferences Within Animals Are Affected by Whether Animals Are Presented Anthropomorphically in Films

“…A control group could also shed light on a possibility that a conspicuous grouping feature present in one of the films led to the observed difference in projections. However, the inclusion of the baseline could be misleading given the high variability of inductive inference patterns relative to children’s prior experiences with nature ( Ross et al, 2003 ; Tarlowski, 2006 , 2017 ).…”

Parent-Child Conversations About Biological Kinds as a Potential Contributor to the Variability in Biological Knowledge

“…The original motivation for this study came from the finding showing high variability in how preschool children's inductive inferences draw on superordinate biological groupings which mark fundamental ontological distinctions (animal and living thing). Past research shows that children whose parents were biology experts or those who had a higher general level of receptive vocabulary were more likely to rely on ontological distinctions in induction (Tarłowski, 2006(Tarłowski, , 2017. The children who participated in the present study were not probed for inductive inference.…”

“…Only the children of biology experts who had access to rich nature reliably based their inductive inferences of biological features on the category animal. Similarly, Tarłowski (2017) showed that access to nature and the size of receptive vocabulary predicted children's reliance on the inclusive category living thing in induction. Both these studies suggest that children's experiences play a vital role in how they represent ontological boundaries and how they apply these boundaries in reasoning.…”

“…He showed that the tendency to make ecological inferences was predicted by whether children spent unsupervised time in nature. Tarłowski (2017) showed that children's tendency to rely on an inclusive concept of a living thing in induction is linked to their exposure to the natural world and the size of their receptive vocabulary. These studies show that the variability in children's reasoning about living kinds can be linked to factors that vary in specificity, such as knowing that plants move toward a goal, being exposed to an anthropocentric description of animals, spending time in nature, having rich vocabulary, etc.…”

Analysis of Children's Drawings to Gain Insight into Plant Blindness

“…Often plant blindness research is conducted on older students, where the Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval process is less rigorous than when working with youth or protected populations, and permission is more easily acquired with agreements that the participants can sign themselves (Balas and Momsen, 2014; Bonnell et al, 2018; Pany, 2014; Schussler and Olzak, 2008). Because children require additional paperwork, the research that has been conducted with children is either basic, such as understanding if a plant is alive or not (Tarłowski, 2017; Villarroel and Infante, 2014), or is related to a specific curriculum or area of the world (Anderson et al, 2014; Fančovičová and Prokop, 2011; Lindemann‐Matthies, 2005; Loureiro and Dal‐Farra, 2017; Manzanal et al, 1999; Natarajan et al, 2002; Nyberg and Sanders, 2014).…”