College 5: Conceptual development

• Conceptual development


  Understanding of objects & events in our environment -> properties associations, causes, effects
• Ccategorisation of concepts


  The ability to treat a set of things as somehow equivalent (Neisser, 1987)

  • Put them in the same pile
  • Call them by the same name
  • Respond to them in the same way
  • Form of inductive reasoning
• Levels of categorisation


  • Superordinate: animal
  • Basic: Dog
  • Subordinate: Chihuahua
• Prototypes


  Highly typical basic objects (Rosch et al., 1975, 1976)
• Categorisation is strongly supported by innate/learning mechanisms of neural information coding, which allows us to form summaries as basis for conscious perception.
• Prototype theory: basic level emerges first (Rosch, 1978)
• Children find it easier to distinguish vehicles from animals, than dogs from horses: superordinate level emerges first (Quinn, 2002; Mandler, 2004)
• Role of language

  Thematic relations:

  • Bees go with honey

  Categorical relations:

  • Bees go with butterflies
• Nouns indicate superordinate categories

  Adjectives indicate subordinate categories
• Development of categorisation

  Characteristic features

  • Grandmothers are old
  • Preferred by 5-year-olds

  Defining features

  • A grandmother is the mother of your parent
  • Preferred by 9-year old

  Might reflect an underlying shift from concrete to abstract
• Psychological essentialism: people have implicit assumptions about the structure of the world, which are represented in categories
• Difference between biological and non-biological entities:

  • Can move on their own
  • Change in appearance (grow taller / fatter / change form or colour)
  • Can inherit characteristics of their forebears
  • Share certain core properties: blood, bones, cellulose
• 2 day old infants can already distinguish point light displays showing biological motion from random point light displays.
• Self-initiated movement

  • 3 categories with unfamiliar entities: animate, inanimate, complex rigid objects
  • Can X go up or down a hill on their own?
• 3 year olds know that animals grow, but are unsure whether artefacts do. 5 year olds know that animals grow and artefacts do not.
• Shared core properties:

  Across development, shift from more abstract expectations to concrete knowledge
• Anthropocentrism: 


  The understanding of biology emerges out of their understanding of people