The development of category-based reasoning during early childhood

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Category-based inductive reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human learning and reasoning that involves inferring a general rule or principle from a specific case. When making inductive inferences, we first observe a property of a given entity (e.g., carrots are good for you), decide that two entities belong to the same category (e.g., carrots and cucumbers are both vegetables), and then infer that the second entity also possesses the property (e.g., therefore, cucumbers are also good for you). This type of reasoning allows us to go beyond the information that we are given and form more global concepts. ******Inductive reasoning is especially critical in early childhood when children must make sense of a vast amount of new information. Inductive reasoning can help them organize their world, as their acquired knowledge can be applied in new contexts. At the same time, the ability to categorize objects and generalize properties from one category member to another allows children to store and retrieve information more efficiently, thereby reducing the demands of learning. In other words, children do not need to keep track of all the individual items that they encounter; instead, they can incorporate new information into existing categories and generalize properties accordingly. ******The long-term objective of my NSERC research program is to characterize the development and nature of inductive reasoning, with the ultimate goal of developing a comprehensive framework that captures young children's inferences about categories and properties. During this grant cycle, my students and I will conduct an ambitious series of studies to address the following objectives: 1) to characterize the origins of category-based inductive reasoning during infancy; 2) to examine the cognitive processes that support infants' category-based inductive reasoning; and 3) to examine how linguistic information guides young children's inductive inferences. ******These objectives will be met in three sets of studies. In the first set, we will examine the emergence of a critical precursor of inductive reasoning, namely, the ability to form associations between categories and their respective properties, between 7- and 9-months of age. In the second set, we will conduct a longitudinal study with infants 14- to 20-months of age to characterize the cognitive processes that support inductive reasoning during the second year of life. In the third set, we will assess how language can be used to help 2-year-olds determine which properties of an object should be generalized to a broader category and which should not. Together, the results of these experiments will significantly advance our understanding of the development of a fundamental cognitive ability during the early childhood years. *****