EXPLANATION, CASE & MECHANISM IN CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

解释、案例

• 批准号: 6032542
• 负责人: FRANK C KEIL
• 金额: $ 15.71万
• 依托单位: YALE UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 1988
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1988-02-01 至 2003-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6032542
• 关键词: adult human (21+); behavior test; behavioral /social science research tag; belief; bias; child psychology; clinical research; cognition; concept; form /pattern perception; human subject; instinct; middle childhood (6-11); neural information processing; preference; preschool child (1-5); psychobiology; thinking

DESCRIPTION: Concept acquisition, structure and use intimately depend on the larger explanatory systems in which concepts are embedded; yet, there has been little work exploring how such systems of explanation develop and come to influence concepts. Six sets of studies will explore how intuitive explanations and understandings emerge in development and how they are related to notions of cause, mechanism and agency. These issues are then linked to broader questions of what concepts are and how they develop. One set of studies explores how a key aspect of explanatory belief works far above the level of knowledge of specific mechanisms and instead involves knowing what sorts of properties are causally potent in a domain and how they are likely to interact. These patterns vary dramatically across large scale domains of phenomena and a partial understanding of these patterns emerges very early in development and guides learning of more detailed beliefs in domains. A second set of studies show children know that explanations and mechanisms are related even when they know few, if any, details of those explanations and mechanisms. They accomplish this by picking up on abstract relational patterns shared by natural phenomena that might appear on the surface to be quite different. A third set of studies explores how children develop preferences for some novel explanations over others even when there is little or no specific knowledge of the phenomena under explanation. A fourth set of studies examines how emerging knowledge of concrete mechanisms acts a bridge between frequency based information and abstract explanatory principles and how it can distort judgments as well as aid them. A fifth set of studies explores constraints on notions of agency and how limitations on those senses strongly guides explanatory constructs. Finally, a set of studies asks about information that children might use to infer the reliabilities of explanations and how this understanding is related to an emerging appreciation of the necessary division of cognitive labor for detailed explanatory knowledge.

描述：概念的习得、结构和使用与 更大的解释系统，其中嵌入了概念；然而，有 几乎没有探索这种解释系统是如何发展和 来影响观念。六组研究将探索直觉性 在发展中出现的解释和理解以及它们是如何出现的 与原因、机制和作用的概念有关。这些问题就是 联系到更广泛的问题，如什么是概念以及它们是如何发展的。一 一组研究探索了解释性信念的一个关键方面是如何发挥作用的 高于对具体机制的知识水平，而是涉及 知道在一个领域中哪些性质是因果有效的，以及如何 他们很可能会互动。这些模式在不同的大型 现象的尺度域和对这些模式的部分理解 在开发早期就出现，并指导学习更详细的 域中的信念。第二组研究表明，孩子们知道 解释和机制是相关的，即使他们知道的很少，如果有的话， 这些解释和机制的细节。他们通过以下方式实现这一点 拾取由自然现象共享的抽象关系模式， 可能在表面上看起来完全不同。第三组研究 探讨儿童如何养成对某些新奇解释的偏好 其他人，甚至在对这些现象几乎没有具体了解的情况下 正在解释中。第四组研究考察了新兴知识如何 具体机制在基于频率的信息和 抽象的解释原则以及它如何扭曲判断以及 帮助他们。第五组研究探索了对代理概念的限制 以及对这些感觉的限制如何有力地指导解释性构造。 最后，一组研究询问了儿童可能使用的信息 推断解释的可靠性以及这种理解是如何 与新兴的认识相关的必要的划分 努力学习详细的说明性知识。