The role of domain-general cognitive resources in children’s construction of a vitalist theory of biology

Abstract

Some episodes of learning are easier than others. Preschoolers can learn certain facts, such as "my grandmother gave me this purse," only after one or two exposures (easy to learn; fast mapping), but they require several years to learn that plants are alive or that the sun is not alive (hard to learn). One difference between the two kinds of knowledge acquisition is that hard cases often require conceptual construction, such as the construction of the biological concept alive, whereas easy cases merely involve forming new beliefs formulated over concepts the child already has (belief revision, a form of knowledge enrichment). We asked whether different domain-general cognitive resources support these two types of knowledge acquisition (conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment that supports fast mapping) by testing 82 6-year-olds in a pre-training/training/post-training study. We measured children's improvement in an episode involving theory construction (the beginning steps of acquisition of the framework theory of vitalist biology, which requires conceptual change) and in an episode involving knowledge enrichment alone (acquisition of little known facts about animals, such as the location of crickets' ears and the color of octopus blood). In addition, we measured children's executive functions and receptive vocabulary to directly compare the resources drawn upon in the two episodes of learning. We replicated and extended previous findings highlighting the differences between conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment, and we found that Executive Functions predict improvement on the Vitalism battery but not on the Fun Facts battery and that Receptive Vocabulary predicts improvement the Fun Facts battery but not on the Vitalism battery. This double dissociation provides new evidence for the distinction between the two types of knowledge acquisition, and bears on the nature of the learning mechanisms involved in each.

How Children’s Cognitive Reflection Shapes Their Science Understanding

“…Vosniadou et al also measured children's executive function skills -set-shifting ability and inhibitory control -and found that children with higher executive function were more likely to categorize the target items by their scientific properties and were faster to do so (see also Bascandziev et al, 2018;Tardiff et al, 2020). These findings echo our finding that children with higher cognitive reflection were more accurate at verifying counterintuitive scientific ideas, and they raise questions about the relation between cognitive reflection and executive function.…”

Children’s discrete proportional reasoning is related to inhibitory control and enhanced by priming continuous representations

“…Importantly, children's inhibitory control skills were specifically related to their performance on comparisons that had misleading information, for example, trials where the largest fraction had the smallest denominator. These results add to the growing evidence suggesting that inhibitory control plays a role in reducing the impact of misleading information in numerosity processing more generally (Gilmore et al, 2013;Norris & Castronovo, 2016) and even in scientific reasoning when content contradicts learners prior knowledge (Bascandziev, Tardiff, Zaitchik, & Carey, 2018;Brookman-Byrne, Mareschal, Tolmie, & Dumontheil, 2018). Here, we aim to investigate, for the first time in children, whether inhibitory control is related to non-symbolic proportional reasoning, especially in contexts with misleading discrete information.…”

Generative Learning: Which Strategies for What Age?

“…Working memory and inhibition together facilitate efficient shifting between tasks or mental states (Best and Miller 2010). These three abilities, collectively termed executive functions (Miyake et al 2000), underlie the ability to reason as well as to test and revise mental models, which are crucial for the acquisition of complex concepts (Bascandziev et al 2018;). Children's deficits in executive functions can therefore be expected to impinge upon the effectiveness of all GLSs, as the construction of relations between to-be-learned information and prior knowledge, as well as the integration of the new information, requires at least basic reasoning abilities (Zaitchik et al 2014).…”