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Developmental Changes in Strategies for Gathering Evidence About Biological Kinds
Author(s) -
FosterHanson Emily,
Moty Kelsey,
Cardarelli Amanda,
Ocampo John Daryl,
Rhodes Marjorie
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/cogs.12837
Subject(s) - psychology , diversity (politics) , sample (material) , variation (astronomy) , inductive reasoning , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , social psychology , mathematics , statistics , sociology , chemistry , physics , chromatography , astrophysics , anthropology
How do people gather samples of evidence to learn about the world? Adults often prefer to sample evidence from diverse sources—for example, choosing to test a robin and a turkey to find out if something is true of birds in general. Children below age 9, however, often do not consider sample diversity, instead treating non‐diverse samples (e.g., two robins) and diverse samples as equivalently informative. The current study ( N = 247) found that this discontinuity stems from developmental changes in standards for evaluating evidence—younger children chose to learn from samples that best approximate idealized views of what category members are supposed to be like (e.g., the fastest cheetahs), with a gradual shift across age toward samples that cover more within‐category variation (e.g., cheetahs of varying speeds). These findings have implications for the relation between conceptual structure and inductive reasoning, and for the mechanisms underlying inductive reasoning more generally.