Children's Inductive Inferences Research Articles

Children's inductive inferences about individuals with gender category uncertainty

AbstractLittle research focuses on children's reasoning about people whose gender is perceived as uncertain. Five‐ to 8‐year‐olds viewed a target with a gender uncertain appearance. The target had trait or preference similarities with a character from a binary, specified gender (i.e., boy, girl) and appearance similarities with another character that had an uncertain gender. Half of the participants heard gender uncertainty labels (i.e., “We're not sure about this person. This person doesn't look like a boy or a girl.”) or gender specification labels (i.e., “This person is a boy.”) for each character. The remaining participants heard miscellaneous character information. Children inferred whether the target favored the same novel activity as the character with similar traits or preferences, but with a specified gender, or the gender uncertain character. Seven‐ and 8‐year‐olds made more trait‐based predictions than 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds, but both age groups made unsystematic predictions in response to preferences, suggesting that some viewed preferences and others viewed gender as reflective of broader similarities among people in this context. A follow‐up study with 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds conveyed gender uncertainty more directly through identification (i.e., “This person is not a boy or a girl.”) and revealed that children consistently made preference‐based, but not trait‐based, predictions about the target. The present findings reveal that children do not reason about gender uncertainty in the same way that they reason about the binary gender categories, which highlights the need to further investigate children's understanding of gender beyond the typical boy and girl dichotomy.

Young Children's Inductive Inferences Within Animals Are Affected by Whether Animals Are Presented Anthropomorphically in Films.

Children are exposed to anthropomorphized animals in a variety of contexts. The literature that analyzes this phenomenon suggests that exposure to anthropomorphic media may strengthen children’s anthropocentric representation of animals. There is an as yet unexplored difference between anthropomorphized and realistic depictions of multiple animal species presented simultaneously in films. The anthropomorphized animals all behave like humans, so they are more behaviorally similar to one another than animals depicted realistically. We asked whether witnessing multiple species depicted anthropomorphically or realistically influences the way 5-year-old children perceive internal commonalities among animals. One group of children (n = 37) watched a cartoon presenting multiple species of anthropomorphized animals, the other group (n = 38) watched a nature documentary that also presented multiple species. Both groups extended a novel internal feature from an animal to a variety of items including diverse animal species. Children watching a cartoon made significantly stronger projections to non-human animals than children watching the documentary. Children’s projections to humans and inanimate objects did not differ between the groups and were uniformly low. One of the possible explanations of the results is in terms of children’s essentialist expectation that behavior is caused by internal properties.

Salience or centrality: Why do some features influence inductive generalization more than others?

This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature-specifically, a creature's head-by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are consistent with cues provided by attentional capture (Deng & Sloutsky, 2012, 2013). However, prior research indicates that heads are special features of entities (Nelson, 2001; Quinn, Eimas, & Tarr, 2001) and that some features of categories guide judgments more than others (Gelman & Wellman, 1991). Thus, it is unclear when feature salience versus feature centrality guides inductive inferences. To clarify this, in Experiment 1, children and adults were presented with stimuli that focused both feature centrality and salience on the same feature (a moving head) and asked to perform classification and induction tasks. In Experiment 2, participants completed the same tasks after they were presented with stimuli that decoupled these effects (moving hands and static heads). These experiments revealed that both feature centrality and feature salience exercised separable influences on children's inductive inferences. Critically, heads powerfully influenced children's inductions, whether they were moving or not. This outcome suggests that prior findings were provoked by combining feature salience and centrality, and not elicited by manipulations of feature salience alone. These results are discussed with respect to the labels-as-features debate and in the broader context of the increasingly psychophysical nature of studies exploring children's conceptual development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

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

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.

Category coherence in children's inductive inferences with cross-classified entities

Items rarely belong to a single category, but rather can be cross-classified into many categories, each serving a very different basis for induction. Presently, little is known about how children determine which category to use for induction in cross-classification situations. This research examined the role of category coherence in children's and adults’ (N=329) inductive reasoning about cross-classified entities. In Study 1 and 2, participants were presented with a person who could be cross-classified into two categories, one coherent and the other incoherent. Category coherence is the extent to which members of a category and/or the properties of a category make sense together, given one's background knowledge. The results showed that by age 5 years, children are systematic in their use of coherence, tending to select the coherent category to inform their inference about the person. There is weaker evidence for 4-year-olds. Study 3 and 4 revealed that 4-year-olds have an appreciation for coherence in tasks of categorization. The results of Study 5 demonstrated 5-year-olds’ and adults’ tendency to use coherence when reasoning about cross-classified entities across different induction tasks. Overall, these results contribute to our emerging understanding of how and why children select some categories versus others during induction with cross-classified items.

Category structure affects the developmental trajectory of children's inductive inferences for both natural kinds and artefacts

Inductive reasoning is fundamental to human cognition, yet it remains unclear how we develop this ability and what might influence our inductive choices. We created novel categories in which crucial factors such as domain and category structure were manipulated orthogonally. We trained 403 4–9-year-old children to categorise well-matched natural kind and artefact stimuli with either featural or relational category structure, followed by induction tasks. This wide age range allowed for the first full exploration of the developmental trajectory of inductive reasoning in both domains. We found a gradual transition from perceptual to categorical induction with age. This pattern was stable across domains, but interestingly, children showed a category bias one year later for relational categories. We hypothesise that the ability to use category information in inductive reasoning develops gradually, but is delayed when children need to process and apply more complex category structures.

Speaker reliability guides children's inductive inferences about novel properties

Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the current paper, we tested whether 3- and 5-year-old children attend to speaker reliability when they make inductive inferences about a non-obvious property of a novel artifact based on its label. Children were more likely to use a reliable speaker's label than an unreliable speaker's label when making inductive inferences. Thus, children not only prefer to learn from reliable speakers, they are also more likely to use information from reliable speakers as the basis for future inferences. The findings are discussed in light of the debate between a similarity-driven and a label-driven approach to inductive inferences.

Developmental changes in children's inductive inferences for biological concepts: implications for the development of essentialist beliefs

AbstractWe examined developmental changes in children's inductive inferences about biological concepts as a function of knowledge of properties and concepts. Specifically, 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds and 9‐ to 10‐year‐olds were taught either familiar or unfamiliar internal, external, or functional properties about known and unknown target animals. Children were asked to infer whether each of four probes, varying in categorical and perceptual similarity to the target, also shared that property. Overall, children made more inferences for known concepts and familiar properties. Older children were more likely to use categorical than perceptual information when making inferences about internal and functional properties of known concepts; however, younger children, in general, made no distinction for property type, and they weighted categorical and perceptual information similarly. Both age groups utilized appearance when making inferences about external properties. Results are discussed in terms of developmental changes in children's appreciation of essentialism. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Word, thought, and deed: The role of object categories in children's inductive inferences and exploratory play.

Previous research (e.g., S. A. Gelman & E. M. Markman, 1986; A. Gopnik & D. M. Sobel, 2000) suggests that children can use category labels to make inductive inferences about nonobvious causal properties of objects. However, such inductive generalizations can fail to predict objects' causal properties when (a) the property being projected varies within the category, (b) the category is arbitrary (e.g., things smaller than a bread box), or (c) the property being projected is due to an exogenous intervention rather than intrinsic to the object kind. In 4 studies, the authors showed that preschoolers (M = 48 months; range = 42-57 months) were sensitive to these constraints on induction and selectively engaged in exploration when evidence about objects' causal properties conflicted with inductive generalizations from the objects' kind to their causal powers. This suggests that the exploratory actions children generate in free play could support causal learning.

Children's Inductive Inferences within Superordinate Categories: The Role of Language and Category Structure

One important function of categories is to allow inferences that extend beyond surface appearances. In 2 studies, preschool and second-grade children were tested on their understanding that members of a category have similar internal parts. In 1 study, children were taught new information about the internal structure of various objects (e.g., an apple), then were probed to determine how far they generalized the new information (e.g., to another apple, to other fruit, to an unrelated object). In a second study, children participated in an open-ended interview that probed whether various types of objects had "the same kinds of stuff inside." Children at both ages and in both studies drew many inferences concerning the internal children to report that members of a basic-level category had the same internal parts. Older children drew more inferences at the superordinate level than did younger children. Older children were also more sensitive to differences in category domain (natural kind vs. artifact) at both basic and superordinate levels. Altogether, these results suggest that preschool children assume that basic-level categories share internal parts. They need to refine this belief at the basic level and to extend it to superordinate-level categories.

Children's Inductive Inferences within Superordinate Categories: The Role of Language and Category Structure

Children's Inductive Inferences within Superordinate Categories: The Role of Language and Category Structure

Young Children's Inductions from Natural Kinds: The Role of Categories and Appearances

Recent analyses of natural kind terms (e.g., dog, gold) suggest that people expect members of a kind to share unforeseen properties. The present study investigated the development of this expectation by studying children's inductive inferences. On each of a series of problems, 3- and 4-year-old children were taught a new fact about an object and then were asked whether it would generalize to: an object that looked like the original, that had the same label as the original, that looked like the original and had the same label, or that differed from the original in both respects. The results indicate that 3- and 4-year-olds drew more inferences based on category membership than on perceptual appearances, when both were available. Furthermore, children often based their inferences on category membership even when no label was provided. Thus even 3-year-olds assumed that natural kind categories include more than superficial features.