Inductive reasoning during infancy and early childhood

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The development of the ability to reason inductively is a fundamental component of cognitive development. Put, briefly, inductive reasoning involves invoking the premise that things that are true for one exemplar of a category (e.g., the blue ball bounces) will hold true for other members of the same category (e.g., therefore all balls bounce). Thus, inductive reasoning allows children to generalize knowledge to new instances and new situations, resulting in increased cognitive efficiency and the opportunity to benefit from past experiences. During the last granting period, we discovered that infants as young as 12-months of age can reason inductively about novel objects. Moreover, we found that they would use shared object names to guide this process.   During the next granting period, we will explore the development of inductive abilities during infancy, and examine the role of language in guiding preschoolers' inductive inferences about novel categories. In three sets of studies, we will examine when inductive reasoning abilities emerge during infancy (Set 1);  explore the influence of naming in guiding infants' inductive inferences about nonobvious object properties (Set 2); and  examine the how language can help preschoolers learn which properties of objects are characteristic of a particular category and which properties are not (Set 3). The results of the proposed studies will offer important insights into these relatively understudied developmental phenomena and will advance our understanding of the interaction between linguistic and conceptual knowledge in early development.