Differences in preschool children's conceptual strategies when thinking about animate entities and artifacts

Two-, 3-, and 4-year-old children viewed 10 stimulus sets. Each set contained a sample picture (e.g., a dog), a basic-level taxonomic match (e.g., another dog), a thematic match (e.g., a bone), and an irrelevant match (e.g., a pen). The children were asked to choose a match that "goes with" each sample. Sample pictures were either animate entities or artifacts. The children's choice behavior indicated that a shift occurs between 3 and 4 years of age from a taxonomic bias to a thematic bias and that, at both ages, animate sample stimuli enhance the children's tendency to adopt thematic conceptual strategies. These data are consistent with recent suggestions that thematic thinking presupposes basic-level taxonomic thinking during early conceptual development and that this developmental progression occurs more rapidly in some domains of knowledge than in others.