Understanding Natural Cause: Children's Explanations of How Objects and Their Properties Originate

2009

Cognition

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Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., Birds fly) about animals than artifacts. This may reflect differences in participants' generic knowledge about specific animals/ artifacts (e.g., dogs/chairs), or it may reflect a more general distinction. To test this, the current experiments asked adults and preschoolers to generate properties about novel animals and artifacts (Experiment 1: Real animals/artifacts; Experiments 2-3: Matched pairs of maximally similar novel animals/artifacts). Data demonstrate that even without prior knowledge about these items, the likelihood of producing a generic is significantly greater for animals than artifacts. These results leave open the question of whether this pattern is the product of experience and learned associations or instead a set of early-developing theories about animals and artifacts.Generic noun phrases (e.g., Birds fly) have been hypothesized to "provide a window onto human concepts" (Gelman & Tardif, 1998, p. 215). By referring to a category as an abstract whole (birds in general as opposed to any particular bird or birds), generics express generalizations about shared properties of category members. Research demonstrates that both children and adults produce significantly more generics for categories within the domain of animals than for those within the domain of artifacts (e.g., Gelman, Coley, Rosengren, Hartman, & Pappas, 1998;Gelman, Goetz, Sarnecka, & Flukes, 2008;Gelman & Tardif, 1998;Goldin-Meadow, Gelman, & Mylander, 2005). However, why this pattern is found is unclear.Some have proposed that the animacy bias in generics may reflect a broad differentiation between animal and artifact concepts. For example, animal concepts are more likely to be richly structured and essentialized than artifact concepts (e.g., Gelman, 2003). On this view, the greater proportion of generics in conversation regarding animals may reflect fundamental differences in how these concepts are structured. However, one alternative hypothesis is that this bias may instead reflect lower-level differences in children's familiarity with or generic knowledge base about the particular animal versus artifact categories being discussed (e.g., dogs versus chairs): children may simply know more generic information about specific, basiclevel animal kinds than about specific, basic-level artifact kinds. For example, they may have learned numerous generic properties of dogs (e.g., Dogs have fur, four legs, cold noses; Dogs bark, wag their tails, dig for bones, retrieve sticks) but few generic properties of chairs (e.g., Chairs are for sitting; Chairs have legs and a seat). The current experiments aim to test the Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Amanda C. Brandone, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Email: Brandone@umich.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing t...

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Domain-specificity Of Generic Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Differences in preschoolers’ and adults’ use of generics about novel animals and artifacts: A window onto a conceptual divide

Brandone

2009

Cognition

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“…This perspective is supported by research showing that infants reliably distinguish between animals and artifacts in the first year of life (Mandler & McDonough, 1993), and that by preschool, children demonstrate a great deal of domain-specific theoretical knowledge about animal and artifact categories. For example, preschoolers acknowledge the role of human action in the creation of artifacts; they view animals as created by nature and artifacts as created by people (Gelman & Kremer, 1991), and they believe there is an important role for the intent of a human creator in assigning artifact identity (Bloom, 1996; Diesendruck, Markson, & Bloom, 2003; Gelman & Bloom, 2000) and function (Defeyter & German, 2003; German & Johnson, 2002). …”

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confidence: 99%

A developmental examination of the conceptual structure of animal, artifact, and human social categories across two cultural contexts

Rhodes

2009

Cognitive Psychology

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285

390

Previous research indicates that the ontological status that adults attribute to categories varies systematically by domain. For example, adults view distinctions between different animal species as natural and objective, but view distinctions between different kinds of furniture as more conventionalized and subjective. The present work (N = 435; ages 5-18) examined the effects of domain, age, and cultural context on beliefs about the naturalness vs. conventionality of categories. Results demonstrate that young children, like adults, view animal categories as natural kinds, but artifact categories as more conventionalized. For human social categories (gender and race), beliefs about naturalness and conventionality were predicted by interactions between cultural context and age. Implications for the origins of social categories and theories of conceptual development will be discussed.Keywords cognitive development; natural kinds; social categories; concepts; categorization; culture; gender; race; naïve biology; artifacts An important developmental achievement is that of organizing experience into categories (e.g., tigers, chairs, girls). Categories enable us to store information efficiently and to generalize and extend knowledge in new ways. To develop functional adult-like concepts, children must learn not only how objects are commonly classified, but also what kind of meaning to attribute to categories. The goal of the present set of studies was to examine the fundamental meaning that individuals affix to categories in various domains across development. Specifically, we examine developmental and cultural influences on whether particular categories are understood as reflecting the objective, natural structure of the world (i.e., as natural kinds) or as subjective groupings that are dependent on convention (i.e., as conventionalized categories).The question of whether categories reflect objectively-determined, natural structure or subjective, flexible conventions has been the subject of rich philosophical discussion about the relations among representation, language, and nature (Putnam, 1975; Quine, 1969;Schwartz, 1979;Wilson, 1999). With regard to cognitive psychology, this distinction provides an Address for correspondence: Marjorie Rhodes, 2422 East Hall, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. rhodesma@umich.edu. Phone: 734-646-2360. Fax: 734 764 3520. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptCogn Psychol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 November 1. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Auth...

“…Carey, 1995). Previous work has demonstrated that younger preschoolers have many systematic domain-specific beliefs about animals and artifacts, including about how category membership is determined (Disendruck, Markson, & Bloom, 2003; Gelman & Kremer, 1991), category stability (Gelman & Wellman, 1991; Keil, 1989; Siegel & Callanan, 2007), characteristic properties (Simons & Keil, 1995), and causal processes (Hatano & Inagaki, 1994; Massey & Gelman, 1988; Rosengren, Gelman, Kalish, & McCormick, 1991). Yet, whether preschoolers have systematic ontological beliefs about category boundaries (e.g., viewing some categories as more objective and discrete than others) has not been addressed in prior work.…”

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confidence: 99%

Preschool Ontology: The Role of Beliefs About Category Boundaries in Early Categorization

Rhodes

Journal of Cognition and Development

Karuza

2013

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These studies examined the role of ontological beliefs about category boundaries in early categorization. Study 1 found that preschool-age children (N= 48, ages 3–4) have domain-specific beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries; children judged the boundaries of natural kind categories (animal species, human gender) as discrete and strict, but the boundaries of other categories (artifact categories, human race) as more flexible. Study 2 demonstrated that these domain-specific ontological intuitions guide children’s learning of new categories; children (N = 28, 3-year-olds) assumed that the boundaries of novel animal categories would be narrower and more strictly defined than novel artifact categories. These data demonstrate that abstract beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries shape early conceptual development.