Preschoolers use pedagogical cues to guide radical reorganization of category knowledge

Butler, Lucas P.; Markman, Ellen M.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.10.002

Cited by 68 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Our results suggest that ostensive communication can play a role in disambiguating what kind an object belongs to from early infancy, even if this requires disregarding its surface features. This conclusion is in line with findings with preschoolers, who go beyond salient perceptual features (color or shape) when sorting objects only if object function is ostensively demonstrated to them (Butler & Markman, ). It seems that ostensive demonstration serves a similar function already in infancy, at least with familiar object kinds.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Seeing behind the surface: communicative demonstration boosts category disambiguation in 12‐month‐olds

Kovács¹,

Téglás²,

Gergely³

et al. 2016

Developmental Science

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In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We tested the hypotheses that 1-year-old infants distinctively represent familiar objects as exemplars of their kind, and that ostensive communication plays a role in determining kind membership for ambiguous objects. In the training phase of our experiment, infants were exposed to movies displaying an agent sorting objects from two categories (cups and plates) into two locations (left or right). Afterwards, different groups of infants saw either an ostensive or a non-ostensive demonstration performed by the agent, revealing that a new object that looked like a plate can be transformed into a cup. A third group of infants experienced no demonstration regarding the new object. During test, infants were presented with the ambiguous object in the plate format, and we measured generalization by coding anticipatory looks to the plate or the cup side. While infants looked equally often towards the two sides when the demonstration was non-ostensive, and more often to the plate side when there was no demonstration, they performed more anticipatory eye movements to the cup side when the demonstration was ostensive. Thus, ostensive demonstration likely highlighted the hidden dispositional properties of the target object as kind-relevant, guiding infants' categorization of the foldable cup as a cup, despite it looking like a plate. These results suggest that infants likely encode familiar objects as exemplars of their kind and that ostensive communication can play a crucial role in disambiguating what kind an object belongs to, even when this requires disregarding salient surface features.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Seeing behind the surface: communicative demonstration boosts category disambiguation in 12‐month‐olds

Kovács¹,

Téglás²,

Gergely³

et al. 2016

Developmental Science

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“…We also do not wish to claim that history is unique in directing children's attention to nonobvious cues. Preschool children seek nonobvious, albeit nonhistorical cues in their exploratory play (Schulz, Standing, & Bonawitz, ) and when reasoning about causes (see also Butler & Markman, ; Sobel et al., ; Walker et al., ) and object functions (Kelemen et al., ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children Seek Historical Traces of Owned Objects

Gelman

Manczak²,

Was

et al. 2015

Child Development

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An object's mental representation includes not just visible attributes but also its nonvisible history. The present studies tested whether preschoolers seek subtle indicators of an object's history, such as a mark acquired during its handling. Five studies with 169 children 3-5 years of age and 97 college students found that children (like adults) searched for concealed traces of object history, invisible traces of object history, and the absence of traces of object history, to successfully identify an owned object. Controls demonstrated that children (like adults) appropriately limit their search for hidden indicators when an owned object is visibly distinct. Altogether, these results demonstrate that concealed and invisible indicators of history are an important component of preschool children's object concepts.

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“…For example, framing a causal problem verbally is critical to enabling children to extract relevant causal evidence (Butler & Markman, ). Furthermore, whether adults deliberately demonstrate evidence shapes the extent to which children use that evidence to guide their causal inferences, such as whether that evidence is generalizable (Butler & Markman, , ) and important (Butler & Markman, ; Yu & Kushnir, ). Just as important as what adults choose to frame or point out is what adults neglect to address even when they could have.…”

Section: A New Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, as mentioned earlier, all evidence has a social history and all scientific reasoning has fundamentally social components. Thus, how children decide what evidence to attend to and what conclusions to draw could be influenced by how evidence is framed and produced (Butler & Markman, , , , ; Yu & Kushnir, ), as well as by broader social factors such as conformity, consensus, and group affiliation (Chen, Corriveau, & Harris, ; Haun, Rekers, & Tomasello, ).…”

Section: A New Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Empirical Child? A Framework for Investigating the Development of Scientific Habits of Mind

Butler

2020

Child Dev Perspectives

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We live in the information age. Broad access to vast troves of information can benefit society considerably, providing conduits for inquiry by individuals of all ages, enabling the spread of important information to previously isolated populations, and facilitating social connections across the globe. However, inundated with information from an ever‐expanding array of sources, we also live in the misinformation age. Thus, it is of paramount importance to raise the next generation to approach the world through an empirical, evaluative lens, and to work to foster the development of habits of mind that will guide how children engage with the world. In this article, I present a new theoretical framework for investigating children’s engagement in and understanding of three key steps in the empirical process: (a) asking questions and forming a hypothesis, (b) collecting and analyzing data, and (c) communicating evidence. I discuss young children’s capacities for engaging in each step as well as the obstacles they may encounter in doing so, and suggest approaches for researchers working toward this pressing societal goal.

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Preschoolers use pedagogical cues to guide radical reorganization of category knowledge

Cited by 68 publications

References 67 publications

Seeing behind the surface: communicative demonstration boosts category disambiguation in 12‐month‐olds

Seeing behind the surface: communicative demonstration boosts category disambiguation in 12‐month‐olds

Children Seek Historical Traces of Owned Objects

The Empirical Child? A Framework for Investigating the Development of Scientific Habits of Mind

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