The Emergence of Inductive Reasoning During Infancy: Learning from Single and Multiple Exemplars

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe the emergence of category-based inductive reasoning during the infancy and preschool years, with focus on the adherence to a fundamental induction principle, premise-conclusion similarity. We review evidence demonstrating that 13- to 22-month-old infants and preschoolers use both category information and perceptual similarity to guide their inductive inferences about nonobvious properties under various conditions. Next, we describe recent studies from our lab focusing on 9- and 11-month-olds’ tendency to associate properties with familiar and unfamiliar animal categories. These studies highlight the following: (1) infants as young as 9 months can link sound properties with animal categories and (2) the tendency to map properties to categories varies by the type of category (familiar vs. unfamiliar animals) and whether infants are familiarized with a single category member or multiple category members.