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 language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-10 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Cognitive Development |
Volume | 49 |
Early online date | 13 Nov 2018 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 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