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1.
Children acquire general knowledge about many kinds of things, but there are few known means by which this knowledge is acquired. In this article, it is proposed that children acquire generic knowledge by sharing in pretend play. In Experiment 1, twenty-two 3- to 4-year-olds watched pretense in which a puppet represented a "nerp" (an unfamiliar kind of animal). For instance, in one scenario, the nerp ate and disliked a carrot. When subsequently asked generic questions about real nerps, children's responses suggested that they had learned general facts (e.g., nerps dislike carrots). In Experiment 2, thirty-two 4- to 5-year-olds learned from scenarios lacking pretend speech or sound effects. The findings reveal a long overlooked means by which children can acquire generic knowledge. 相似文献
2.
Although recent research indicates that an increased sensitivity to visual appearances develops around 4 or 5 years of age, evidence from perceptual studies suggests that certain types of appearances, that is, projective size and shape, are not noticed or understood until at least 7. 4 experiments investigated preschool children's knowledge of the projective size--distance and projective shape--orientation relationships. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds were asked whether an object should be moved farther or nearer in order to increase or decrease its apparent size. 4-year-olds performed significantly better than chance, but 3-year-olds did not. Experiment 2 showed that 3-year-olds are able to perceive projective size changes, indicating that although they do not fully understand the projective size-distance relationship, the necessary perceptual information is potentially available to them. In Experiment 3, 3- and 4-year-olds were asked to indicate how a circular object should be rotated to make it appear either circular or elliptical. Again, 4-year-olds performed significantly better than chance, but 3-year-olds did not. Again also, the results of Experiment 4 indicate that although 3-year-olds are not aware of the projective shape-orientation relationship, they are capable of attending to changes in projective shape. Thus, the constraints on children's knowledge of the projective size-distance and projective shape-orientation relationships seem to be at least partly cognitive rather than wholly perceptual. These results are interpreted as further evidence for the acquisition of level 2 percept knowledge during early childhood. 相似文献
3.
These studies investigate children's use of scientific reasoning to infer the reality status of novel entities. Four- to 8-year-olds heard about novel entities and were asked to infer their reality status from 3 types of evidence: supporting evidence, irrelevant evidence, and no evidence. Experiment 1 revealed that children used supporting versus irrelevant and no evidence differentially. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children without initial reality status biases were better at evaluating evidence than were biased children. In conclusion, the ability to infer reality status from evidence develops incrementally between ages 4 and 6, and children perform better when their evaluation is free from bias. 相似文献
4.
This research investigated children's ability to recognize gaps in their knowledge and seek missing information from appropriate informants. In Experiment 1, forty-five 4- and 5-year-olds were adept in assigning questions from 3 domains (medicine, firefighting, and farming) to corresponding experts (doctor, firefighter, or farmer). However, when given the options of answering the same questions themselves or assigning them to an expert (Experiment 2), only 6-year-olds were consistently able to recognize when they did not know answers and then assign test questions correctly. Four- and 5-year-olds tended to overestimate their own knowledge or assign questions to the wrong expert. This result was replicated in Experiment 3, in which 5-year-olds were given incentives for correct answers. 相似文献
5.
Trait attribution is central to people's na?ve theories of people and their actions. Previous developmental research indicates that young children are poor at predicting behaviors from past trait-relevant behaviors. We propose that the cognitive process of behavior-to-behavior predictions consists of two component processes: (1) behavior-to-trait inferences and (2) trait-to-behavior predictions. Experiment 1 demonstrates that 4-, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds can infer trait labels from behaviors. Experiment 2 demonstrates that 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds can predict behaviors from trait labels but not from past behaviors. Experiment 3 demonstrates that 4- and 5-year-olds understand traits as predictive and stable over time. Taken together, these three studies show that young children, in possessing component trait-reasoning processes, have a nascent understanding of traits. 相似文献
6.
7.
2 experiments examined children's understanding of the distinction between real and apparent emotion. In Experiment 1, 6- and 10-year-old children listened to stories in which it would be appropriate for the story protagonist to feel either a positive or negative emotion but to hide that emotion. Subjects were asked to say both how the protagonist would look and how the protagonist would really feel, and to justify their claims. The results indicated that 6- and 10-year-olds alike could distinguish quite accurately between real and apparent emotion, although 10-year-olds were somewhat better at justifying this distinction. In Experiment 2, a slightly modified procedure was used to test 4- and 6-year-olds. Again, 6-year-olds demonstrated their grasp of the difference between real and apparent emotion, and even 4-year-olds showed a limited grasp of the distinction. The findings are discussed in relation to recent research concerning children's concept of mind, their grasp of the appearance-reality distinction, their ability to produce complex, embedded justifications, and their ideas about emotion. 相似文献
8.
In two experiments, one hundred and sixty-two 6- to 8-year-olds were asked to reason counterfactually about events with different causal structures. All events involved overdetermined outcomes in which two different causal events led to the same outcome. In Experiment 1, children heard stories with either an ambiguous causal relation between events or causally unrelated events. Children in the causally unrelated version performed better than chance and better than those in the ambiguous condition. In Experiment 2, children heard stories in which antecedent events were causally connected or causally disconnected. Eight-year-olds performed above chance in both conditions, whereas 6-year-olds performed above chance only in the connected condition. This work provides the first evidence that children can reason counterfactually in causally overdetermined contexts by age 8. 相似文献
9.
Victimizers and Their Victims: Children''s Conceptions of the Mixed Emotional Consequences of Moral Transgressions 总被引：3，自引：0，他引：3
4-8-year-old children's conceptions of the emotional consequences of moral transgressions were assessed in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, most children expected victimizers to feel positive emotions and victims to feel negative emotions, but 8-year-olds who assessed victims first subsequently attributed less positive emotions to victimizers. Despite efforts to manipulate the salience of victims' losses in Experiment 2, children had similar expectations about the emotional consequences of transgressions. However, a developmental shift emerged: 4-year-olds attributed extremely positive emotions to victimizers due to the material gains produced by victimization, whereas 8-year-olds attributed less positive emotions to victimizers, in part due to the unfairness and harm produced by victimization. Probe questions revealed that older children also attributed additional negative-valence emotions to victimizers, suggesting that victimizers are expected to feel conflicting rather than exclusively positive emotions. Discussion focused on potential cognitive constraints in children's conceptions of moral emotions. 相似文献
10.
How Much Does a Shared Name Make Things Similar? Linguistic Labels, Similarity, and the Development of Inductive Inference 总被引：6，自引：0，他引：6
This article examines the development of inductive generalization, and presents a model of young children's induction and two experiments testing the model. The model specifies contribution of linguistic labels and perceptual similarity to young children's induction and predicts a correspondence between similarity judgment and induction of young children. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 11- to 12-year-olds were presented with triads of schematic faces (a Target and two Test stimuli), which varied in perceptual similarity, with one of the Test stimuli sharing a linguistic label with the Target, and another having a different label. Participants were taught an unobservable biological property about the Target and asked to generalize the property to one of the Test stimuli. Although 4- to 5-year-olds' proportions of label-based inductive generalizations varied with the degree of perceptual similarity among the compared stimuli, 11- to 12-year-olds relied exclusively on labels, and 7- to 8-year-olds appeared to be a transitional group. In Experiment 2 these findings were replicated using naturalistic stimuli (i.e., photographs of animals), with perceptual similarity manipulated by "morphing" naturalistic pictures into each other in a fixed number of steps. Overall results support predictions of the model and point to a developmental shift from treating linguistic labels as an attribute contributing to similarity to treating them as markers of a common category-a shift that appears to occur between 8 and 11 years of age. 相似文献
11.
Knowledge, Concepts, and Inferences in Childhood 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
The role of knowledge in children's inferences was investigated in 3 experiments. Experiment 1 examined developmental changes in the role of categorical membership, perceptual appearance, and item complexity in inferences for natural kind and artifact concepts. Preschoolers (5-year-olds), second graders (8-year-olds), and fourth graders (10-year-olds) were taught novel properties about target concepts and asked whether each of 4 probes had those properties. Probes varied in category membership and perceptual appearance relative to the target item. Item complexity also varied. Experiments 2 and 3 examined inferences with known and unknown concepts for familiar and unfamiliar properties. Older children's knowledge led to differential weighting of categorical information over appearance but only for known concepts and/or familiar properties. Preschoolers made no distinction between category and appearance for either known or unknown concepts. Additionally, as target item complexity increased, older children made more inferences than preschoolers. No differences between inferences about natural kind and artifact concepts were found. The role of theories and knowledge in children's drawing of inferences is discussed. 相似文献
12.
Young children's attribution of action to beliefs and desires 总被引：4，自引：0，他引：4
When and how children understand beliefs and desires is central to whether they are ever childhood realists and when they evidence a theory of mind. Adults typically construe human action as resulting from an actor's beliefs and desires, a mentalistic interpretation that represents a common and fundamental form of psychological explanation. We investigated children's ability to do likewise. In Experiment 1, 60 subjects were asked to explain why story characters performed simple actions, such as looking under a piano for a kitten. Both preschoolers and adults gave predominantly psychological explanations, attributing the actions to the actor's beliefs and desires. Even 3-year-olds attributed actions to beliefs and false beliefs, demonstrating an understanding of belief not evident in previous research. In Experiment 2, 24 3-year-olds were tested further on their understanding of false belief. They were given both false belief prediction and explanation tasks. Children performed well on explanation taks, attributing an anomalous action to the actor's false belief, even when they failed to predict correctly what action would follow from a false belief. We concluded that 3-year-olds and adults share a fundamentally similar construal of human action in terms of beliefs and desires, even false beliefs. 相似文献
13.
Children's use of a verbal-nonverbal consistency principle to infer truth and lying was investigated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, kindergarten (5-year-olds), second- (7-year-olds), and fourth-grade (9-year-olds) children judged the truthfulness of stimulus persons whose verbal communication and nonverbal communication varied in valence (positive, neutral, and negative). In Experiment 2, children from the same 3 grades were presented part of the verbal communications on audiotape and a similar set of general verbal communications. They were asked to predict what facial expression the speaker would show if he or she was telling the truth or lying. The findings yielded by both experiments indicated that the use of the verbal-nonverbal consistency principle increased with age. Use of that principle was demonstrated by fourth grade children who judged that telling the truth, as opposed to lying, was shown by a consistency between the affective valence of the verbal and the nonverbal communications. 相似文献
14.
Three studies investigated children's belief in causal determinism. If children are determinists, they should infer unobserved causes whenever observed causes appear to act stochastically. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds saw a stochastic generative cause and inferred the existence of an unobserved inhibitory cause. Children traded off inferences about the presence of unobserved inhibitory causes and the absence of unobserved generative causes. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds used the pattern of indeterminacy to decide whether unobserved variables were generative or inhibitory. Experiment 3 suggested that children (4 years old) resist believing that direct causes can act stochastically, although they accept that events can be stochastically associated. Children's deterministic assumptions seem to support inferences not obtainable from other cues. 相似文献
15.
2 experiments on the development of the understanding of random phenomena are reported. Of interest was whether children understand the characteristic uncertainty in the physical nature of random phenomena as well as the unpredictability of outcomes. Children were asked, for both a random and a determined phenomenon, whether they knew what its next outcome would be and why. In Experiment 1, 4-, 5-, and 7-year-olds correctly differentiated their responses to the question of outcome predictability; the 2 older groups also mentioned appropriate characteristics of the random mechanism in explaining why they did not know what its outcome would be. Although 3-year-olds did not differentiate the random and determined phenomena, neither did they treat both phenomena as predictable. This latter result is inconsistent with Piaget and Inhelder's characterization of an early stage of development. Experiment 2 was designed to control for the possibility that children in Experiment 1 learned how to respond on the basis of pretest experience with the 2 different phenomena. 5- and 7-year-olds performed at a comparable level to the same-aged children in Experiment 1. Results suggest an earlier understanding of random phenomena than previously has been reported and support results in the literature indicating an early understanding of causality. 相似文献
16.
Julian Jara-Ettinger Sammy Floyd Holly Huey Joshua B. Tenenbaum Laura E. Schulz 《Child development》2020,91(4):1135-1149
Four experiments show that 4- and 5-year-olds (total N = 112) can identify the referent of underdetermined utterances through their Naïve Utility Calculus—an intuitive theory of people’s behavior structured around an assumption that agents maximize utilities. In Experiments 1–2, a puppet asked for help without specifying to whom she was talking (“Can you help me?”). In Experiments 3–4, a puppet asked the child to pass an object without specifying what she wanted (“Can you pass me that one?”). Children’s responses suggest that they considered cost trade-offs between the members in the interaction. These findings add to a body of work showing that reference resolution is informed by commonsense psychology from early in childhood. 相似文献
17.
Two experiments explored whether children's correct answers to counterfactual and future hypothetical questions were based on an understanding of possibilities. Children played a game in which a toy mouse could run down either 1 of 2 slides. Children found it difficult to mark physically both possible outcomes, compared to reporting a single hypothetical future event, "What if next time he goes the other way ..." (Experiment 1: 3-4-year-olds and 4-5-year-olds), or a single counterfactual event, "What if he had gone the other way ...?" (Experiment 2: 3-4-year-olds and 5-6-year-olds). An open counterfactual question, "Could he have gone anywhere else?," which required thinking about the counterfactual as an alternative possibility, was also relatively difficult. 相似文献
18.
Preschool children (N = 104) read a book that described and illustrated color camouflage in animals (frogs and lizards). Children were then asked to indicate and explain which of 2 novel animals would be more likely to fall prey to a predatory bird. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds were tested with pictures depicting animals in camouflage and noncamouflage settings; in Experiment 2, 4-year-olds were tested with real animals. The results show that by 4 years of age, children can learn new biological facts from a picture book. Of particular importance, transfer from books to real animals was found. These findings point to the importance that early book exposure can play in framing and increasing children's knowledge about the world. 相似文献
19.
The effects of object orientation and object type on children's interpretation of the word big 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
Previous research indicates that preschool children have persistent difficulty interpreting big: 4-5-year-olds typically interpret big to mean tall, and 3-year-olds fail to use any consistent interpretation. We propose that children's interpretation may vary depending on 2 contextual factors: type of object and orientation of object. 40 children (ages 3 and 5) each saw 35 pairs of items and, for each pair, were asked to point to "the big one." Type of object was varied by showing each child 3 kinds of objects: "people," "brownies," and rectangles. Orientation of object was varied by presenting objects either standing perpendicular to the tabletop (vertical condition) or lying flat on the tabletop (horizontal condition). Older children relied on height more consistently than younger children, all subjects relied on area more often in the horizontal condition than in the vertical condition, and 3-year-olds relied on height more when judging the bigness of people than of rectangles matched for size. Taken together, these results demonstrate that contextual factors clearly influence children's responses. These results demonstrate the interplay of cognitive and semantic factors in the process of semantic development. 相似文献
20.
Previous research has demonstrated that preschoolers can use situation-specific (e.g., visual access) and person-specific (e.g., prior accuracy) cues to infer what others know. The present studies investigated whether 4- and 5-year-olds appreciate the differential informativeness of these types of cues. In Experiment 1 (N = 50), children used others' prior labeling accuracy as a cue when learning labels for, but not the visual identity of, hidden objects. In Experiment 2 (N = 64), with both cues present, children attended more to visual access than prior accuracy when learning the visual identity of, but not labels for, hidden objects. These findings demonstrate that children appreciate the difference between situation- and person-specific cues and flexibly evaluate these cues depending on what information they are seeking. 相似文献