Ontological Constraints in Children's Inductive Inferences: Evidence From a Comparison of Inferences Within Animals and Vehicles

Andrzej Tarlowski

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00520

Abstract

There is a lively debate concerning the role of conceptual and perceptual information in young children's inductive inferences. While most studies focus on the role of basic level categories in induction the present research contributes to the debate by asking whether children's inductions are guided by ontological constraints. Two studies use a novel inductive paradigm to test whether young children have an expectation that all animals share internal commonalities that do not extend to perceptually similar inanimates. The results show that children make category-consistent responses when asked to project an internal feature from an animal to either a dissimilar animal or a similar toy replica. However, the children do not have a universal preference for category-consistent responses in an analogous task involving vehicles and vehicle toy replicas. The results also show the role of context and individual factors in inferences. Children's early reliance on ontological commitments in induction cannot be explained by perceptual similarity or by children's sensitivity to the authenticity of objects.

Highlights

A lively debate on the early development of induction is motivated by two opposing views, namely the perceptual and the early knowledge view
The aim of the present study was to address unresolved theoretical questions concerning the role of ontological constraints in inductive inference: Can children ignore perceptual similarity to avoid crossing the ontological boundary if this boundary is not explicitly highlighted in the design? Do ontological boundary limits constrain their inferences, such that they expect properties of real animals not to extend to toy animals while not holding an analogous expectation for the properties of real and toy vehicles? In order to address these questions, I presented children with a computerized induction task in which they projected internal properties from real dogs to either dissimilar real animals or to similar toy animals and from real cars to either dissimilar real vehicles or to similar toy vehicles
The results showed an influence of conceptual information on inductive inference

Summary

Introduction

A lively debate on the early development of induction is motivated by two opposing views, namely the perceptual and the early knowledge view. While both approaches agree that perceptual information informs children’s induction (Gelman and Medin, 1993; Jones and Smith, 1993), the controversy lies in the role of category knowledge in children’s inferences. According to the early knowledge view, young children’s inferences employ rich category knowledge which is embedded in domain theories (Murphy and Medin, 1985). If a predicate is inappropriately applied across the ontological boundary, it generates category mistakes, e.g., “a car has babies, a rock

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