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Ontological Constraints in Children's Inductive Inferences: Evidence From a Comparison of Inferences Within Animals and Vehicles.

ABSTRACT: There is a lively debate concerning the role of conceptual and perceptual information in young children's inductive inferences. While most studies focus on the role of basic level categories in induction the present research contributes to the debate by asking whether children's inductions are guided by ontological constraints. Two studies use a novel inductive paradigm to test whether young children have an expectation that all animals share internal commonalities that do not extend to perceptually similar inanimates. The results show that children make category-consistent responses when asked to project an internal feature from an animal to either a dissimilar animal or a similar toy replica. However, the children do not have a universal preference for category-consistent responses in an analogous task involving vehicles and vehicle toy replicas. The results also show the role of context and individual factors in inferences. Children's early reliance on ontological commitments in induction cannot be explained by perceptual similarity or by children's sensitivity to the authenticity of objects.

SUBMITTER: Tarlowski A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5937141 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Ontological Constraints in Children's Inductive Inferences: Evidence From a Comparison of Inferences Within Animals and Vehicles.

Tarlowski Andrzej A

Frontiers in psychology 20180430

There is a lively debate concerning the role of conceptual and perceptual information in young children's inductive inferences. While most studies focus on the role of basic level categories in induction the present research contributes to the debate by asking whether children's inductions are guided by ontological constraints. Two studies use a novel inductive paradigm to test whether young children have an expectation that all animals share internal commonalities that do not extend to perceptu ...[more]

PMID: 29760669

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Project description:Digital Voice Assistants (DVAs) have become a ubiquitous technology in today's home and childhood environments. Inspired by (Bernstein and Crowley, J Learn Sci 17:225-247, 2008) original study (n = 60, age 4-7 years) on how children's ontological conceptualizations of life and technology were systematically associated with their real-world exposure to robotic entities, the current study explored this association for children in their middle childhood (n = 143, age 7-11 years) and with different levels of DVA-exposure. We analyzed correlational survey data from 143 parent-child dyads who were recruited on 'Amazon Mechanical Turk' (MTurk). Children's ontological conceptualization patterns of life and technology were measured by asking them to conceptualize nine prototypical organically living and technological entities (e.g., humans, cats, smartphones, DVAs) with respect to their biology, intelligence, and psychology. Their ontological conceptualization patterns were then associated with their DVA-exposure and additional control variables (e.g., children's technological affinity, demographic/individual characteristics). Compared to biology and psychology, intelligence was a less differentiating factor for children to differentiate between organically living and technological entities. This differentiation pattern became more pronounced with technological affinity. There was some evidence that children with higher DVA-exposure differentiated more rigorously between organically living and technological entities on the basis of psychology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study exploring children's real-world exposure to DVAs and how it is associated with their conceptual understandings of life and technology. Findings suggest although psychological conceptualizations of technology may become more pronounced with DVA-exposure, it is far from clear such tendencies blur ontological boundaries between life and technology from children's perspective.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00146-022-01555-3.

Dataset Information

Ontological Constraints in Children's Inductive Inferences: Evidence From a Comparison of Inferences Within Animals and Vehicles.

Publications

Ontological Constraints in Children's Inductive Inferences: Evidence From a Comparison of Inferences Within Animals and Vehicles.

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