Developmental “Roots” in Mature Biological Knowledge

Young children tend to claim that moving artifacts and nonliving natural kinds are alive, but neglect to ascribe life to plants. This research tested whether adults exhibit similar confusions when verifying life status in a speeded classification task. Experiment 1 showed that undergraduates encounter greater difficulty (reduced accuracy and increased response times) in determining life status for plants, relative to animals, and for natural and moving nonliving things, relative to artifacts and nonmoving things. Experiment 2 replicated these effects in university biology professors. The professors showed a significantly reduced effect size for living things, as compared with the students, but still showed greater difficulty for plants than animals, even as no differences from the students were apparent in their responses to nonliving things. These results suggest that mature biological knowledge relies on a developmental foundation that is not radically overwritten or erased with the profound conceptual changes that accompany mastery of the domain.

[1]  W. Wordsworth,et al.  The complete poetical works of William Wordsworth , 1888 .

[2]  J. Piaget,et al.  The Child's Conception of the World , 1971 .

[3]  I. Sigel,et al.  HANDBOOK OF CHILD PSYCHOLOGY , 2006 .

[4]  Lance J. Rips,et al.  Semantic distance and the verification of semantic relations , 1973 .

[5]  Lance J. Rips,et al.  Structure and process in semantic memory: A featural model for semantic decisions. , 1974 .

[6]  D. Scott.  Perceptual learning. , 1974, Queen's nursing journal.

[7]  E. Rosch,et al.  Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories , 1975, Cognitive Psychology.

[8]  M. McCloskey,et al.  Decision processes in verifying category membership statements: Implications for models of semantic memory , 1979, Cognitive Psychology.

[9]  Sharon Lee Armstrong,et al.  What some concepts might not be , 1983, Cognition.

[10]  J. D. Smith,et al.  Overall similarity in adults' classification: The child in all of us. , 1984 .

[11]  D. Medin,et al.  The role of theories in conceptual coherence. , 1985, Psychological review.

[12]  S. Carey.  Conceptual Change in Childhood , 1985 .

[13]  R. Siegler,et al.  Children's understandings of the attributes of life. , 1986, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[14]  Susan Carey,et al.  Conceptual Differences Between Children and Adults , 1988 .

[15]  F. Keil,et al.  Early differentiation of causal mechanisms appropriate to biological and nonbiological kinds. , 1991, Child development.

[16]  H. Wellman,et al.  Cognitive development: foundational theories of core domains. , 1992, Annual review of psychology.

[17]  F. Keil.  Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development , 1989 .

[18]  G. Hatano,et al.  Young children's naive theory of biology , 1994, Cognition.

[19]  Edward E. Smith,et al.  Similarity- versus rule-based categorization , 1994, Memory & cognition.

[20]  S. Gelman,et al.  Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity In Cognition And Culture , 1994 .

[21]  Robert L. Goldstone.  The role of similarity in categorization: providing a groundwork , 1994, Cognition.

[22]  Curt Burgess,et al.  Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence , 1996 .

[23]  Ellen M. Markman,et al.  Early Word Learning , 1997 .

[24]  J. Hampton.  Associative and similarity-based processes in categorization decisions , 1997, Memory & cognition.

[25]  Susan Carey,et al.  Knowledge Enrichment and Conceptual Change in Folkbiology: Evidence from Williams Syndrome , 1998, Cognitive Psychology.

[26]  N. Chater,et al.  Similarity and rules: distinct? exhaustive? empirically distinguishable? , 1998, Cognition.

[27]  F. Keil,et al.  Two dogmas of conceptual empiricism: implications for hybrid models of the structure of knowledge , 1998, Cognition.

[28]  J. Coley,et al.  On the importance of comparative research: the case of folkbiology. , 2000, Child development.

[29]  Susan Carey,et al.  Infants' knowledge of objects: beyond object files and object tracking , 2001, Cognition.

[30]  Four and 6-year olds' biological concept of death: The case of plants , 2002 .

[31]  John E. Opfer,et al.  Identifying living and sentient kinds from dynamic information: the case of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement in conceptual change , 2002, Cognition.

[32]  U. Goswami.  Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development , 2002 .

[33]  D. Barr,et al.  Limits on theory of mind use in adults , 2003, Cognition.

[34]  Ann L. Brown,et al.  Teleo‐functional constraints on preschool children's reasoning about living things , 2003 .

[35]  Robert S. Siegler,et al.  Revisiting preschoolers’ living things concept: A microgenetic analysis of conceptual change in basic biology , 2004, Cognitive Psychology.

[36]  Michael J Cortese,et al.  Visual word recognition of single-syllable words. , 2004, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[37]  Giyoo Hatano,et al.  Vitalistic causality in young children's naive biology , 2004, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[38]  D. Dawda,et al.  AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT , 2006 .

[39]  Rebecca Treiman,et al.  The English Lexicon Project , 2007, Behavior research methods.

[40]  Florencia K. Anggoro,et al.  Naming Practices and the Acquisition of Key Biological Concepts , 2008, Psychological science.

[41]  John E. Opfer,et al.  Development of the Animate-Inanimate Distinction , 2010 .

[42]  Manuela Friedrich,et al.  Early Word Learning , 2010 .

[43]  M. Sullivan.  THE A-THEORY: A THEORY , 2011 .