Vitalistic causality in young children's naive biology

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project aimed at specifying the nature of vitalistic causality, which is supposed to constitute the core of naive biology that young children possess. The following results were found through a series of studies with individual interview methods :1.Both experiments dealing with the effect of contexts and those on forced analogies indicated that children as young as 5 years of age recognized commonalities between animals and plants in terms of vitalism ; these children seemed to believe that living things mean those beings which were similar to humans in terms of taking in vital force from food and water, with its surplus inducing growth. This suggests that early biology is established around taking food/water and growth.2.Experiments requesting subjects to give predictions and some explanations revealed that children ages of 5 and 6 years believed that a sufficient amount of vital power taken in from food not only prevents a person from becoming ill but also helps him/her live longer, and sometimes even cure his/her wound.3.Experiments using choice methods indicated that children aged 4-6 years recognized that biological aspects of daily activities (e.g., eats few vegetables vs.eats a lot of vegetables) influence the susceptibility to illness, but the children also believed that social/psychological aspects (e.g., tell a lie vs.never lie) make some additional contribution to susceptibility to illness. However, when asked to choose a factor between the two, the 5-year-olds chose biological factors as more important for illness, and social/psychological factors as more important for social phenomena (e.g., is invited a birthday party). On the other hand, the 4-year-olds weighed social/psychological factors in determining susceptibility to illness more heavily than the 5-year-olds, though they differentiated biological phenomena from psychological phenomena in their reasoning.