Development of Mind : Concept Development

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We tentatively formulated naive theories by human infants and young children in four domains (physics, biology, psychology and sociology), constructed and/or selected relevant tasks, and implemented the tasks to children of different ages. In naive physics we found that children have a strong belief in gravity which indicates that an unsupported object falls directly below and thus are puzzled until age two or three when it falls through a tube not just below. In naive biology, we showed that young children understand and memorize animal behaviors by relying on the person analogy ; they spontaneously generate vitalistic explanations for bodily phenomena and assert that vital power taken from food prevents being infected with diseases, enables people to live long, and cures an injury quickly ; and they can differentiate between living things and complex artifacts that apparently moves themselves in terms of internal processes. We also found that even young children can differentiate two psychological states, desire and intention, and that they can readily grasp the basic trade schema of exchanging good with another good or money but reveal various misconceptions beyond this basic naive sociological schema. In general, naive theories develop in domain-specific and unique ways, but sometimes mutually interact.We also investigated "conceptual" capabilities among non-human animals, especially among primates and birds, by applying tasks used for human infants and toddlers and trying to identify elements of naive theories that can be found or trained among these animals. We observed that some birds, not to mention nonhuman primates, can recognize "essence" beyond perceptual similarities.