Naive Biology Research Articles

People Do Not Always Know Best: Preschoolers’ Trust in Social Robots

ABSTRACT In this paper, we investigated whether Canadian preschoolers prefer to learn from a competent robot over an incompetent human using the classic trust paradigm. An adapted Naive Biology task was also administered to assess children’s perception of robots. In Study 1, 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds were presented with two informants; A social, humanoid robot (Nao) who labeled familiar objects correctly, while a human informant labeled them incorrectly. Both informants then labeled unfamiliar objects with novel labels. It was found that 3-year-old children equally endorsed the labels provided by the robot and the human, but 5-year-old children learned significantly more from the competent robot. Interestingly, 5-year-olds endorsed Nao’s labels even though they accurately categorized the robot as having mechanical insides. In contrast, 3-year-old children associated Nao with biological or mechanical insides equally. In Study 2, new samples of 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds were tested to determine whether the human-like appearance of the robot informant impacted children’s trust judgments. The procedure was identical to that of Study 1, except that a non-humanoid robot, Cozmo, replaced Nao. It was found that 3-year-old children still trusted the robot and the human equally and that 5-year-olds preferred to learn new labels from the robot, suggesting that the robot’s morphology does not play a key role in their selective trust strategies. It is concluded that by 5 years of age, preschoolers show a robust sensitivity to epistemic characteristics (e.g., competency), but that younger children’s decisions are equally driven by the animacy of the informant.

Daily animal exposure and children’s biological concepts

A large body of research has focused on the developmental trajectory of children’s acquisition of a theoretically coherent naive biology. However, considerably less work has focused on how specific daily experiences shape the development of children’s knowledge about living things. In the current research, we investigated one common experience that might contribute to biological knowledge development during early childhood—pet ownership. In Study 1, we investigated how children interact with pets by observing 24 preschool-aged children with their pet cats or dogs and asking parents about their children’s daily involvement with the pets. We found that most of young children’s observed and reported interactions with their pets are reciprocal social interactions. In Study 2, we tested whether children who have daily social experiences with animals are more likely to attribute biological properties to animals than children without pets. Both 3- and 5-year-olds with pets were more likely to attribute biological properties to animals than those without pets. Similarly, both older and younger children with pets showed less anthropocentric patterns of extension of novel biological information. The results suggest that having pets may facilitate the development of a more sophisticated, human-inclusive representation of animals.

Development of 5- to 9-year-old children's understanding the probabilities of the causes of illness

Objective To study the development of children's understanding the probabilities of the causes of illness.Methods 120 5-to 9-year-old children were interviewed via open-ended items and forced choices about illness. Results There were statistical significance in their understanding of the probabilities of the causes of illness and their strategies of prediction among the three groups(χ2(2)= 50.134,P ＜0.01;χ2(6)= 95.781, P ＜0.01);in addition, there was statistical significance between the two educational backgrounds (χ2(1)= 11.162, P ＜0.01;χ2(3)= 35.043, P ＜0.01). Conclusion Some preschool-aged children viewed outcomes of familiar causes of illness as probabilistic. The children's understanding of the causes' probabilities appeared to be based on naive biology. 5- to 9-year-old children made probabilistic predictions from a single cause to multiple causes. Children coming from higher educational backgrounds outperformed their counterparts coming from lower educational backgrounds with respect to understanding illness. Key words: Children; Illness; Probability

À l’école et au supermarché : le développement des connaissances sur deux organisations sociales

The development of naive theories regarding social organizations has not received the same emphasis as other conceptual domains, such as naive biology and naive psychology. However, a number of studies have been devoted to the development of children's naive conceptions of politics, school, or economics, most of them with interviews. In the present study, we studied six-, 10-, 14-year-old children's conceptions regarding two familiar organizations, school and supermarket. Results show that, even young children have knowledge regarding these two institutions. However, even 10-year-old children might fail to integrate these institutions in more general organizational, institutional and social dimensions. In many cases, only children aged 14 consistently integrate these various dimensions.

Young Children's Conception of the Biological World

What are the components of children's biological-knowledge system before systematic teaching at school? Can this knowledge system be called naive biology? We propose that young children's biological-knowledge system has at least two essential components—(a) the knowledge needed to identify biological entities and phenomena and (b) teleological and vitalistic causality—and that these components constitute a form of biology. We discuss how this naive biology serves as the basis for performance and learning in socially and culturally important practices, such as health practices and biology instruction.

Emerging distinctions between naive biology and naive psychology

Emerging distinctions between naive biology and naive psychology

Do children have a theory of race?

In recent years a number of studies have detailed young children's enriched, domain-specific, and theory-like understanding in several cognitive domains, including naive biology, naive psychology, and reasoning about physical objects. With few exceptions, students of cognition have not considered the possibility that the acquisition and representation of social categories may also be governed by a specialized faculty for understanding. Rather, most accounts of children's social categorization assume that the classification of the human realm is derived from observations of superficial differences in appearance and does not include expectations of deeper commonalities among category members. Five experiments are reported that challenge this view. The results indicate that young children's inferences about human racial variation involve domain-specific reasoning that parallels but is distinct from common sense understanding of naive biology. These findings have implications for our understanding of the transfer of knowledge across domains and for determining the appropriate level of description of domain-specific devices.

Young children's naive theory of biology

This article aimed at investigating the nature of young children's naive theory of biology by reviewing a large number of studies conducted in our laboratories. More specifically, we tried to answer the following five critical questions. What components does young children's knowledge system for biological phenomena (or naive biology) have? What functions does it have in children's lives? How is it acquired in ontogenesis? How does its early version change as children grow older? Is it universal across cultures and through history? We propose that young children's biological knowledge system has at least three components, that is, knowledge needed to specify the target objects of biology, ways of inferring attributes or behaviors of biological kinds, and a non-intentional causal explanatory framework, and that these three constitute a form of biology, which is adaptive in children's lives. We also claim that the core of naive biology is acquired based on specific cognitive constraints as well as the general mechanism of personification and the resultant vitalistic causality, but it is differently instantiated and elaborated through activity-based experiences in the surrounding culture.