We're going to the zoo: Interactive educational activities with animals boost category-based induction in children

Julia R. Badger*, Laura R. Shapiro

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We investigated whether category-based induction can be enhanced through educational activities with real-life animals. Four induction tasks involving pictures of real and novel biological kinds were administered to 252 children aged 5- to 7- years, split across two testing sessions. Between these two testing sessions, 129 of these children took part in a zoo-based educational activity where their attention was directed towards the importance of non-obvious category features. In the first testing session, older children made significantly more category inferences, consistent with developmental accounts of category-based induction. In the second testing session, there was a greater increase in category-based induction decisions made by children in the training condition. We suggest that category-based induction could be driven by an accumulation of category knowledge which leads to a deeper understanding of the importance of category features.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-10
Number of pages10
JournalCognitive Development
Volume49
Early online date13 Nov 2018
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2019

Bibliographical note

© 2018, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Keywords

  • Category
  • Child development
  • Education
  • Induction
  • Training

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