Development of Mind : Concept Development

我们尝试性地在四个领域（物理学、生物学、心理学和社会学）中构建人类婴幼儿的朴素理论，构建和/或选择相关的任务，并将任务实施到不同年龄的儿童身上。在朴素物理学中，我们发现孩子们对重力有很强的信念，这表明一个没有支撑的物体会直接落在下面，因此直到两三岁时，当它福尔斯一个管子而不是下面时，他们都感到困惑。在朴素生物学中，我们表明，幼儿通过依赖人的类比来理解和记忆动物行为;他们自发地对身体现象产生活力论解释，并断言从食物中获取的生命力可以防止感染疾病，使人们长寿，并迅速治愈创伤;他们可以区分生物和复杂的人工制品，这些人工制品显然是按照内部过程移动的。我们还发现，即使是年幼的儿童也可以区分两种心理状态，欲望和意图，他们可以很容易地掌握用另一种商品或金钱交换商品的基本交易图式，但在这种基本天真的社会学图式之外，他们会表现出各种误解。一般来说，幼稚理论的发展具有特定的领域和独特的方式，但有时会相互影响。我们还研究了非人类动物的“概念”能力，特别是灵长类和鸟类，通过应用人类婴儿和幼儿的任务，并试图确定这些动物中可以发现或训练的幼稚理论的元素。我们观察到，一些鸟类，更不用说非人类的灵长类动物，可以识别“本质”超越感知相似性。

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.