TY - GEN
T1 - Exploring informal science interventions to promote children's understanding of natural categories
AU - Kachergis, George
AU - Gureckis, Todd M.
AU - Rhodes, Marjorie
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019.All rights reserved.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Categories carve up the world in a structured way, allowing people to inductively reason about the properties of novel exemplars. Children are still in the process of learning category structure, and often fail to leverage the inductive power of these representations to their advantage. For example, young children generally fail to recognize the value of sampling diverse exemplars to support category-wide generalization. This study investigates whether teaching children the structure within a natural category increases diversity-based inductive reasoning. In an informal science learning environment, we presented 259 children aged 5 to 8 years with exemplars of the three main types of birds: raptors, songbirds, and waterbirds. After a short dialogue pointing out the various within-type similarities and between-type differences, children's diversity-based inductive reasoning did not significantly improve, despite them evidencing a better understanding of the category's structure. Instead, children tended to avoid sampling waterbirds, the least typical cluster of birds. These patterns suggest that children's neglect of sample diversity is unlikely to be solely due to their relative ignorance of category structure.
AB - Categories carve up the world in a structured way, allowing people to inductively reason about the properties of novel exemplars. Children are still in the process of learning category structure, and often fail to leverage the inductive power of these representations to their advantage. For example, young children generally fail to recognize the value of sampling diverse exemplars to support category-wide generalization. This study investigates whether teaching children the structure within a natural category increases diversity-based inductive reasoning. In an informal science learning environment, we presented 259 children aged 5 to 8 years with exemplars of the three main types of birds: raptors, songbirds, and waterbirds. After a short dialogue pointing out the various within-type similarities and between-type differences, children's diversity-based inductive reasoning did not significantly improve, despite them evidencing a better understanding of the category's structure. Instead, children tended to avoid sampling waterbirds, the least typical cluster of birds. These patterns suggest that children's neglect of sample diversity is unlikely to be solely due to their relative ignorance of category structure.
KW - category induction
KW - category learning
KW - conceptual development
KW - diversity-based reasoning
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85128399143&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85128399143&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85128399143
T3 - Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
SP - 1978
EP - 1983
BT - Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019
Y2 - 24 July 2019 through 27 July 2019
ER -