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Where the wild things are: informal experience and ecological reasoning
1Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA. j.coley@neu.edu
Child Development
|May 3, 2012
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Cognitive science
- Ecology
Background:
- Category-based induction relies on selecting relations for inferences.
- Understanding how children develop biological reasoning is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine the development of inferences based on ecological relations in children.
- To investigate the influence of experience and environment on biological reasoning.
Main Methods:
- 346 children (6, 8, 10 years old) from diverse communities.
- Assessed inferences about novel diseases/insides between species (ecological vs. taxonomic).
- Surveyed children's nature exploration activities and community type.
Main Results:
- Ecological inferences increased with age and nature exploration, decreased with population density.
- By age 10, children favored taxonomic inferences for 'insides' and ecological for 'diseases'.
- Rural children showed this pattern earlier; context significantly impacts reasoning.
Conclusions:
- Biological reasoning development is influenced by age, environmental context, and nature experience.
- Children's inference patterns adapt based on the type of information (disease vs. insides).
- Environmental factors like community type and informal learning shape cognitive development in science.
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