essentialism

Gelman’s research has demonstrated that young children possess an essentialist view and even some adults use this same concept. As stated in the lecture slides, Gelman defines essentialism as an “assumption that categories of things in the world have a true, underlying nature or ‘essence’ that causes things to be in particular categories, gives them their identity”. Gelman uses three concepts to provide evidence of essentialism. The first concept is inductive potential. Inductive potential is the ability to group a new member of a category into the preexisting category based on similar traits. The second concept that Gelman uses is innate dispositions. This concept states that nature will not be affected by nurture. The third concept is maintenance of identity. This idea comes from the fact that you can dress something up, but it will remain the same. Gelman believes that children can be born with an essentialist point of view.

Children will use the essentialist view as part of their learning process. Gelman believes that essentialism is an innate part of life that you are born with. Once you start to understand what essentialism is, it is easy to see where she comes up with this idea. Gelman did research on young children to see if they understood what essentialism was. Gelman found that children as young as four understood what inductive potential were. Children understand that “an object will be more similar to members of the same category, even if it looks more similar to members of another category.” To test if children understood the concept of innate disposition, Gelman presented the idea that an animal was raised with another class of animals to children. Gelman than asked the children characterized traits questions about the raised animal. Children understood that nature would beat nurture. The third concept was used to see if children understand that you can dress an object up, but will it remain the same. Keil found that second grade students understood this concept for animal, but not for artifacts. These concepts are basic ideas and it is understandable why children are able to grasp them. As children mature, the concepts do not get abandoned and new concepts are formed.

This week in class I found the concept of essentialism very interesting. It was interesting to me because I could understand how it was related in everyday life. The concepts seem easy enough that a child could easily use it as part of their learning. An example of this would be the concept of Halloween. During the fun of dressing up for Halloween, a child still knows that there is a person behind the costume. Not only do children use essentialism, but adults will use it too. An example would be that if I’m meeting a friend of a friend, I’m assuming that the friends share similar character traits. Another example would be that if I’m seeing something for the first time than I will use underlying categories to define the new item. I agree with Gelman’s idea that essentialism is an innate concept.

I found the way that children develop the concept of time to be extremely interesting while we were discussing it in class. We talked about how time includes both experiential and logical aspects. Experienced time is how long we think a particular event takes place, while logical time is produced through reasoning.
In our book it discusses experiential time and how even children as young as four months old can discriminate between two movies being run forward and backwards showing a liquid being poured into a glass. This shows that these young infants have knowledge of how our world operates and that in order for one thing to occur there is a specific process that must also occur in along with a specific time in which that process happens. “Thus, understanding of temporal order seems well established in the first year of life” (Siegler and Alibali, pg. 284). This knowledge is very important in understanding how and why our world works the way that it does.
Logical time is often harder to develop and there are people ranging in all ages including adults that still do not have this concept fully developed. Our book also talks about the single object/single motion intuition is the belief that all parts of the same object will move at the same speed when it is in motion. This is hard to explain but the race car example works well, where a race car travelling around a race track has two doors on it that are moving at different speeds, the one on the outside is moving much faster. This idea is much better realized when it is acted out in real life with examples such as two people holding on to a pole and walking in a circle, where the outside person must walk a lot faster to keep up with the inside person. Without this demonstration or other knowledge of physics logical time is a much more complex concept to fully understand.
The knowledge and understanding of time in our society is crucial. We differ in our society in that we are extremely time oriented and always must stick to a strict schedule, where other societies for instance in Mexico this time obsession is much different, they rely more on personal interactions rather than set chronological time. The development or this concept of time is therefore very important for infants to understand in our society.

Development of a category of gender

Psychological essentialism is a mode of category representation in which membership of a category requires an underlying and unchanging reality, in other words, an essence (Gelman et al. 1994; Prentice and Miller, 2007). Recent studies with adult participants show that categories that can be observed by relatively stable physical qualities, such as categories of race, ethnicity, and physical disability are more strongly essentialized than categories associated with social class, appearance, or interests (Haslam et al., 2000). According to Haslam et al. (2000), among all the categories that are used to categorize people, including age, race, and intelligence, the categorical domain that is the highest in essentialism is gender. Although gender may be the most essentialized category compared to other categories, research suggests that the categorization of gender follows a reverse U-shaped developmental path, changing from a not essentialist to highly essentialist understanding, and then going back to a less essentialist understanding.

At the beginning of the development of a category of gender, there does not appear to be an essentialist view. Children between the ages of 2 and 3 believe that a person’s sex can change by changing external features such as clothing and hairstyle (Siegler & Alibali, 2005). They do not see sex as a permanent feature and believe that one can change their sex if they want to change it. Even though this pattern of categorization does not imply anything about whether young children perceive gender as a social or biological category, it implies that young children do not see gender as a category determined by essence.

Gender as a category of essence seems to appear by the age of 4, when children start to attribute gender differences to underlying and unchanging biological sex differences. A study by Taylor (1996) demonstrates this tendency toward essentialism and how it changes with age. In this study, 4 to 10 year-old children and adults were presented a story in which a baby was raised on an island with only members of the opposite sex (e.g. a girl raised by men) or with only members of the same sex (e.g. a girl raised by women). Then, they were asked what properties that character would have at age 10. At all ages, participants in the same-sex island condition said the character would acquire same-sex properties. However, in the opposite-sex condition, children up to age 10 based their responses significantly more on gender category rather than the effects of the environment. For example, they said a baby girl would acquire feminine properties even though she was raised by men. In contrast, 10-year-old children and adults responded that a baby girl would acquire more masculine properties when raised by men. This study suggests that on average, children up to 10-years-old see gender as a category of essence, and after 10-years-old, gender is perceived more as a social category that can be influenced by environment.

In a world where adults do not have a consensus on how much of gender as a category can be attributed to social factors or biological qualities, it is surprising to see the consensus among children about seeing gender as an essential category up to a certain age. Research on the domain-specifity of categorization processes of children may shed light to both why children follow such a U-shaped development and why the end of this U-shape only reaches to the point which makes gender the category domain that is the highest in essentialism among adults.

Children are innate essentialists??

In the class, I wondered how we know that a whale actually is not fish. I also wondered when we start understanding that plants also have lives like we do. It seems that we just know everything about this world naturally after we grew up. Recent studies have suggested that we learn to categorize by judging essential requirements for each categories. In addition, the study by Gelman and her colleagues (1994) suggested that children already have innate assumptions of the world. In other words, children already have ability to make judgments on essential conditions. In order to test their hypothesis, Gelman and her colleagues (1994) ruled out several explanations that children develop the knowledge of the world by reviewing other studies. Specifically, they ruled out the explanation such that children’s judgments do not rely on perceptual similarity, their past experiences and teaching from their parents. Nevertheless, children’s past experiences, their perceptual development and their parents help children to become essentialist.

First of all, it is impossible that children would do well on categorizing without their perceptual observation. For instance, to understand the concept of living and non-living, children need to observe the differences and the similarities between living objects and non-living objects. The more detailed they observe between living objects and non-living objects, the more concrete concepts of living and non-living they have developed. Specifically, they might notice all living subject would move, and then they observed that all living objects would grow and die. Thus, it is possible that children construct the essential conditions for each categories based on their perceptual development.

Second, the past experience plays an important role on helping children to revise their existed categories. Take the study of gender-role properties as an example. Children in young age were confused of the gender of a male Barbie if it were dressed in a skirt. However, children in older age, they knew what is essential to determine genders and were not confused the gender role by outside appearance . Related to children’s perceptual development, children in young age only noticed the outside appearance. But, how do children start to notice what is essential to observe? Apparently, children might know the essential differences between genders through their past experiences. For example, they might notice the difference between body structures of genders when they take bath with their siblings or their parents. So, their past experience might give them chance to observe the salient difference among categories.

Third, although parents do not explicitly teach their children an essentialist philosophy, parents might influence children’s reasoning. Children might have more past experiences than others if their parents encourage them to discover this world. For example, preschool children with helicopter parents might be prevented from observing animals, insects or plants closely because their parents are overprotecting. They worry that their children might get germs or get hurt from playing with animals, insects or plants. Thus, preschool children with helicopter parents might not have enough experiences and observations to construct their theory of the world than other preschool children with normal parents. In addition, the children with responsive parents might have more knowledge of world and human than children with non-responsive parents. For instance, responsive parents give corrective information to their children repeatedly and rapidly when their children think that a caterpillar is a still caterpillar after it grows up. On the other hand, non-responsive parents might ignore the errors that children made and the questions that children asked. Presumably, children with responsive parents might have more knowledge of the world and human because responsive parents encourage them to seek new knowledge and revise the incorrect concepts of the world and human that children made.

In conclusion, although the study by Gelman (1994) provided the evidence that preschool children are innate essentialists, children still need their past experience, their perception and the knowledge from their parents to build up the assumptions of the world. For example, it is doubtful that a child would know that there is blood inside of his or her body if he or she never experiences bleeding or sees others bleed. Therefore, it is possible that children’s innate knowledge of the world is not innate. Instead, children’s theory of the world and human is based on he combination of their perceptual observation, accumulation of past experiences and the knowledge from their parents.

The Importance of Education

The one thing that I have continually noticed throughout the readings is the importance of educating children. And by educating, I don’t just mean formally, with books and classrooms. I also mean through life experiences. In many of the problem solving topics discussed in the reading, and even biological processes, children could not ever gain the knowledge that they need to be successful in life without experience with the outside world.

First of all, when discussing biological concepts, it is important to note that children do seem to have some innate knowledge of biological and non-biological movement, and that with some amount of time they also come to understand living and non-living objects, but without the experiences that they have had in life, they could not come to know either. The book even mentions a study done by Inagaki (1990) where they compared the understanding of children that had raised goldfish as pets to children that hadn’t raised goldfish. The children that had experience with a pet was better able to understand another kind of animal that they were less familiar with, simply because they had some personal concept of living things.

Also, in many of the problem solving tasks, there is importance put on feedback to and education of the children, and the effects of that on the children. It is important to note that children do have some basic understanding of problem solving, but it is also very interesting to see how they combine what they already know with what they are taught, in order to solve new problems. For example, in the balance-scale problems, it was indicated that even children that were expected to be able to solve such problems, having been taught them in a classroom environment, were unable to make the jump from the type of balance they had learned the problem on to the one used in the experiment. Therein lies a problem, in my opinion. It seems that if the educational system currently in use was actually beneficial to students, they would be able to generalize information that they have learned in classes like physics to real world situations, where the balance problem might not even be a balance, but could be a car teetering on the edge of a cliff. It seems like it would be important to be able to figure out a problem like this in a hurry.

As for mental models, I find it interesting that children have so many different mental models of the earth. In my opinion, this is reassuring, because it shows that children are capable of thinking for themselves. This is useful in many cases, as some teachers start with incorrect information (as before they knew what shape the earth really was) that may have to be corrected at some point in a child’s life. If a child were just blindly taking in information, they would not be able to go back and change old misinformation, and would potentially walk around confused about which information was correct. Sometimes, reading about this stuff makes me wonder what I did when I was the age of the children mentioned in these studies. Did I believe that the earth was round? Although it wasn’t mentioned in this book, I want to point out that there are still people that believe that the earth is flat, and that the photos that we have seen of Earth are not actually real. It seems like that would be difficult information to hold onto so tightly that you can form a cult around it.

However, my main point about education being important was seen in the use of analogous thinking. I found it surprising that even though children of a certain age can be shown how one person solved a problem, they have difficulty using that information to solve a very similar problem, until they are asked to repeat what happened in the previous example. This seems to be some indication that without educational experiences, children could not make certain leaps in their thinking. Of course, over time, children gain general experience with the world that they can use to solve certain types of problems, but if they don’t go out and handle objects and work with gravity and trajectories and those sorts of things, they will never have an ability to solve some of the problems that come up in the daily life of an adult.

Sign Language in Infants

So although I agree that infants who learn to use sign language in infancy learn it more quickly when taught very early, I have a few problems with the overall idea of learning sign language as a better way to communicate with young babies.
First of all, there is significant research to suggest that there is a critical period for language learning in which children's brain's seem to grasp the concepts of language more quickly than during any other period in their lives. If this is the case, how is it that children find it easier to communicate through sign language than speaking language if they supposedly occur at the same time in both hearing and non-hearing infants? So, let's say, the problem for children in speaking to their parents is that their vocal chords aren't fully developed to the point of speaking clearly, why is it then that non-hearing children also have babbling tendencies through signing? It seems that if in fact it was a lack of vocal chord development wouldn't this babbling phenomenon occur just in hearing children?
Another problem I have with this theory of early understanding through sign language is the notion that children can understand signs earlier than they can understand speech, how is this possible? It's not that I don't think that infants can understand signs, I've seen it and know that this is something these infants can in fact do, but why is it that we believe that infants can more easily understand a gesture made in their direction than a word spoken to them. Because "motherese" has been proven to be infants preferred way to be spoken to, how does this translate to sign language? There is no way to soften signs or make them more preferable to infants ears so I find it very difficult to believe that infants would prefer signs to speech.
Because I have seen children utilize sign language to achieve their desires I do not doubt that it is possible for infants to learn this type of communication, I just have a hard time believing that the preference and skill required is as black and white as some parents would like to believe.

children logical reasoning and adults.

Two types of logical reasoning are deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. As we know Deductive reasoning is process in which true previous premises or experiences draw a more general conclusion about a problem or reasoning; it's the reasoning that goes from general premises to a particular reasoning. For example,
All roses smell good,
some roses are flowers,
some flowers smell good.
Inductive reasoning is the complement of deductive; it basically goes from generalizing experiences and make a conclusion bases on this general premise or idea. For example.
My nephew when went to Peru, went to this old cemetery. In that place for lack of space instead of burring the deceased citizens on just regular ground, people are buried in cement walls along with many other, each independently in a portion of this wall. Then when he was back from Peru, my aunt asked her if he wanted to go back to Peru. He's answer was " No I don't because I don't want to be buried in a whole in the wall. Of course we laughed but now that I read the inductive and deductive reasoning. I understand that children usually make this mistakes and compare previous experiences and get into conclusion that might be sometimes true as well as erroneous. My nephew thought

All people living here are buried in wholes in the wall; therefore:
I'm going to be buried in wholes here.

Children deductive and inductive reasoning are sometimes considered as guesses. They fail to conclude circumstances that might not happen or might not logically occur. We tend to develop skillful analogies, use better our imaginary representations, and use better our logical reasoning maybe because of experience, instruction in school and the use of basic logic resources and concepts in math problems and physics. As adults we do learn to think more abstractly and test our premises better than children, but adults make also mistake involving deductive and inductive reasoning such as:

When it rains, the floor gets wet; therefore whenever the floor is wet, it rained.

Here we can see the clear evidence that the last conclusion is erroneous.

Another example imght be
If Ben doesn't clean his room, he doesn't get 1o dollars....Then:

if Ben got 10 dollars, it means he clened his room

If his room is clean he gets 10 dollars....

These two other conclusion can be true, but is not certain that every time he room is clean he gets his dollar or whenever he gets 10 dollars, Ben cleaned his bedroom.

Adults can get into conclusions by either using deductive reasoning or inductive reasoning and get erroneous conclusion in our daily life experiences. The most uncertain conclusion or reasoning is to be said inductive because it draws conclusions from general premises to a more particular or specific conclusion.; therefore inductive reasoning is more likely to be not certain.

The Pineapple Thief, A Story About Means-End Analysis

I'd seen my brothers son Jalen do many things but I'd never seen him take a want/need (pineapple) and make a plan to acquire it. After reading chapter 10 and coming across the means-end analysis, this was the first thing to come to mind.

Children are problem solvers; I'm confident in saying that. But I was surprised to what degree someone as small as 2 years old could go to in order to achieve their overall goal. The situation involved me going over to my brothers house for dinner, I wasn't the only person, it was some sort of family get together. The pizza had just arrived and everyone was sitting around the living room eating. Enter Jalen (his 2ish year old son at the time).

Jalen was a pineapple hound growing up. If there was pineapple on anything he wanted all of it. So naturally one of the pizzas was Hawaiian style. O.k., so Jalen got his normal piece of pizza, picked off the pineapple, ate it, left the rest of the pizza alone and started his rounds. Walking up to everyone, he would body up to your leg and just peer at your plate, if you had pineapple on your pie he would stick around until you made an offering to him. No pineapple equalled no Jalen and he would move on.

So Jalen had made the rounds and no one had pineapple left to offer. He knew what the pizza boxes looked like and he made his way to the kitchen. Sitting atop the dinning room table (which he could see through the clear glass table) was his holy grail, the pizza boxes, and they were left alone unguarded. But the little guy can't reach them, because what do you do when a 2 year old wants something and you don't want him to get it, you put it on top of the table so he can't get reach it.

I remember looking back at him and making a comment to someone about how weird it was that he was just standing looking up at the pizza boxes. Looking back on the situation Jalen must have been making a mental model of what he needed to do to boost his height and reach those boxes. Using a means-end analysis he plotted out his next move.

I'd seen Jalen climb atop a dinning room chair a million times. But only when they were sitting out in the open of the living room, and usually it happened when a lot of people were around to oh and ah about how brave he was to climb up like that. So him getting up on a chair really was no big thing.

Jalen had a plan he just needed to execute. Step one was to get a chair, no easy feat because they were all occupied. He got one though. Step two, move the chair back to the dining room. Once again, not that easy, they are fairly heavy chairs. Step three, position said chair in a way so he could climb up and still be able to reach the top of the table. Step four was simply to claim his prize. Jalen did just that, he claimed all the pineapple off the pizza.

When something like that happens you don't really think about what is going on, you just think about how cute that was. But what is really going on is this little 2 year old is acquiring the processes necessary to deal with life's little obstacles, be it acquiring pineapple like he did, or something larger and more important later in life. He came up with a plan and executed in the proper manner to reach his goal. If that's not using means-end analysis I don't know what is.

Sign Language in Infants

The other evening I was watching the news and there was a story on a local class that was being taught here in Eugene that teaches infants how to sign. Not deaf babies but babies who are absolutely capable of hearing. This is a new craze that parents are trying to teach their infants. For years parents have been teaching their babies to sign but not until recently classes are being offered to help parents teach signing.
These classes are offered at the Eugene Park and Recreation Center, by a woman who believes sign language is going to be the future way to communicate with you infants. Dr. Kathy Faber is widely known for her research and teaching of sign language. She has taught in Europe and all across the US and she is now bringing her services here in Eugene.
Some parents are capable of telling what their babies want by recognizing the type of crying their infants do. Some babies have high pitch screams when they need to be changed and others have long drawn out cries when they are hungry. But not all babies have the same pattern. Teaching infants how to sign, can give you a better idea of what they want. Dr. Faber said the whole craze started to limit babies from crying and whining over their frustrations because of their limit of communication with their parents. One parent of these classes says that her 3 month year old can’t sign but he can recognize what she is signing. The signs that are being taught are simple gesture that infants are capable of doing. A simple gesture like food, more, drink, diaper, bed, mommy, and daddy are the most popular signs being taught. If your infant could communicate what exactly they wanted crying and whining would be lessened.
Psychologists who have investigated this new craze say that infants understand language before their vocal cords develop. This is not surprising to me because we have learned that infants can count and recognize many other complex things before they could speak. The University of Wisconsin has done extensive research on the effects of infants who have learned sign language. They have concluded that infants who learn sign language have a larger vocabulary and will develop a higher IQ compared to infants who don’t learn sign language. Children who are taught sign language are more capable of learning a second language later in life. These infants can also learn how to speak earlier than other infants who have not learned sign language.

One of the things that I found to be fascinating that babies who signing go through something called “signing exposure” which is similar to vocal languages. Once a baby learns a few signs and realizes that signing will get them what they want and their ability to learn signs faster becomes evident. This is similar to the critical period of language development, once an infant learns a few words they make connection with other words, then they go through a stage where the learn words very rapidly. These are exciting finding that might change the way children are raised.

Gopnik's Blinket machine and one year olds

While I was listening to the section on Gopnik's Blinket machine, I couldn't help but wonder if this study or way of studying covariation could be used in children under the age of two. I work at the parenting center Birth to Three with a One's group and it seems to me that I have witnessed children using their reasoning of covariation. One child for example was using a toy which had one button which made the toy play music and light up, it also had several other knobs on it which also resembled buttons. Although there were several other "choices" the child continuously chose the correct button which made the toy turn on. I purpose that if a less complicated toy than the blinket machine could be created it would enable further investigation of younger children and their abilities. A toy which had different buttons on them but only one made the toy flash and one only made the toy play sound. You could tell the child to make the toy flash and play music. Instead of requiring that the child tell which button initiates the sounds and flashing the child could simply be observed. I hypothesize that the child would try the different buttons and be able to identify which ones were the "blinkets" and which ones were not, just as the older children had. You would have to make sure that the buttons were all the same size in order to control for size preferences in children of this age. You could also test covariation on younger children using some sort of looking experiment.
Although this is a rough sketch of an experiment and there could potentially be numerous down falls, I do however feel that it would be very beneficial to see if younger children have this ability. I am sure that Gopnik could come up with a better, more solid experiment.

The Planning Process Appears Throughout Life

Planning is a factor humans use to solve issues within their every day lives. Planning is a central part of organizing business affairs, determining daily schedules, children’s activities and more, it acts as the basis for many individuals daily activities. Within planning we focus on the future, we attempt to determine what will occur in the future and how to make future occurrences happen. To take a more narrow look into planning we can look at the means-ends analysis previously discussed in class. For our purposes we use the means-ends analysis to describe an infant and child’s mode of planning. However, this is a process individuals use in their every day lives from infancy to adulthood. By reducing differences between our goals and current situation humans and infants can develop a process to reach those goals successfully.
The development of means-ends analysis eventually results in an ability to remember sub-goals in order to solve long term problems. The older an individual gets the more steps they can remember to attain their specific goal and will thus eventually develop a procedure for meeting the sub-goals necessary to attain the ultimate goal. An example of this is shown in Klahr (1989) and the "Tower of Hanoi" problem. A child must make their display look exactly like the researcher’s display using seven moves and only two rules: move only one can at a time, and never place a smaller can on a larger one. The children observed are from ages 2 to 6 years and show significant differences in their approaches to planning to reach their goal. Which relay the theory that as we develop our approaches to problem solving and planning get more advanced and sophisticated. Means-ends analysis can be fully related to a college student’s life. For example, currently I wish to eventually get a highly paid job, this is my goal and it can be attained a number of ways. The procedure I have chosen to reach my goal is separated into sub-goals. In order to reach my goal I have determined I need to attend college and get a degree. First I must apply to the college and get accepted. Then, I must take the courses necessary to obtain a degree in a specific field of study. Third, I must pass the courses I am enrolled in to get my degree. This requires many hours of study and attending lectures to do so. Fourth, if I follow sub-goals one through three I will receive my diploma. I then must continue the process toward my goal and apply for jobs I recognize as having the ability to be highly paid. I will have to interview with companies and produce a successful interview that will make the company of my choice choose me over other candidates. In doing all this I will finally acquire my highly paid job and thus attain my goal. Without planning toward a goal such as attaining a highly paid job or in a child’s case the "Tower of Hanoi" problem, an individual will never have the ability to reach their objectives. The process of planning requires steps or sub-goals to be entirely successful.
In my eyes means-ends analysis is the basis to problem solving and planning. Without ones ability to break down the steps towards their ultimate goal, it would seem insurmountable to achieve the goal. By using sub-goals in an ordered sequence to approach future goals we can clearly see how to attain our objectives. The fact we have been doing this in some way or another our entire lives has been proven to develop a method of thinking highly advanced in human beings.

forming categories

In the article by Gelman (1994), she asserted that people will form categories based on physical, surface features, which, provides a means for assigning category membership. At the same time that this category is being formed, base on the intrinsic, unseen, underlying nature of the object, which is coined "essence" is being inferred about the object. Gelman shows that children are especially good at infering intrinsic properties in animals. Her research shows that 93% of children will refer to intrinsic properties of an animal to explain a biological event if no external cause for the event is present. Gelman also studied childrens assumptions about the innate potential of categories by asking them what the outcome for a kangaroo raised by a goat would be. She found that children will answer questions about animals in terms of category membership or innate potential, relying on knowledge about the nature of the animal, rather than the nurture the animal was given. Furthur research showed that 5 year-olds are very accurate at realizing that things can change as they grow (seed-tree, caterpillar-moth), and that it is the internal properties that are critical to the objects identity. They realized at this young age that "essences" will remain unchanged.
With all of this evidence showing that both categories and essences are learned or inferred at the same time, this leads me to think of how negative influence during this learning process can lead to prejudice. It appears that as children experience the world, they categorize the things that they observe, and make inferences about the nature of the the objects in these categories. If a child sees a person with a different skin color, and begins the automatic process of categorizing them, likely assigns similar essences that they have for themselves and other people. My question is this: to what degree will the child integrate this new person of different color into his/her same person category, and what influence do the parents have on assigning essences to this category? To try to answer this, I looked at an fMRI study by Jennifer Eberhart (2005). She examined people for differences in neurological processing of faces of different races. She found increased activations in many areas of the brain when observing faces of other races than that of faces of the participants race. This increased cortical activation is strongly correlated with areas involved in emotion and inhibition. These results suggest a possible hypothesis for my question: The essences of the different race, may be associated with negative emotion, and the increase inhibition may be due to conflict in the separation of the category that that is based on surface clues rather than internal properties of the other person. This still leaves the question of what role the parent plays in the assignment of essences to this race category. I hypothesize that the the parents input about that person; good or bad will become internalized in the child, thus, reinforcing the formation of a sub-category based on external rather than internal cues about the person. This internalization and categorization may account for the deep prejudice observed in some people.

Innateness of Language Acquisition

Chomsky and Lenneberg propose that language is innate and that there is a critical period that ends around puberty, where children are no longer able to learn the rules of language. It is true that there seems to be language functions in certain parts of the brain, which suggests that language may be innate. The fact that there is a critical period for language acquisition seems to support that everyone has the potential to learn a language. If a child lives the first part of their life without any other human contact, they will never be able to learn language like children who are spoken to and raised lovingly by their parents. With all the studies that suggest we have a part of the brain that is used for language, why is it that children who are not exposed to language will never learn it correctly? Genie, for example was a feral child who was locked up until she was thirteen and punished when she vocalized. She could speak about twenty words which seems strange to me, because if babies babble and eventually start speaking, one would think that Genie would also babble as a baby and eventually start to form some sort of language if there is a part of the brain for language acquisition. In some cultures, parents do not speak directly to their children and they still learn their native language without problems. How can this be if Genie was in the same situation and never learned to speak? This brings up the point that language is acquired through nature and nurture. It is obvious through this example that children need to hear and experience language if they are able to form it themselves. However, the rapidity at which children learn language shows that there must be some innateness in the task.

So if language is acquired by nature and nurture, how is it that deaf children can still learn language if they have never heard it spoken? American Sign Language (ASL) is a full language that has the components of a spoken language, so maybe the parts of the brain that help with acquisition can be applied to signs as well as words. But what about children who are hearing that have deaf parents? Do they learn language as well as children with hearing parents? One difference in having deaf parents is that the child must look at the parent and learn to interpret the signs. Deaf parents understand that a child’s visual perspective is important, and that the child must pay attention to understand. However, hearing parents may not fully understand that a deaf baby responds more to visual stimulus because they can’t hear.

An interesting phenomenon is the learning of a second language, after the critical period has already passed. If Genie was never able to correctly learn even a first language after she was rescued, how is it that adults can learn a second language? If a person is able to learn a first language, they already understand the structure and concept of language, so maybe they can apply their knowledge of language in general to the new one they are learning. An example of this is adults learning ASL. It is similar to learning a foreign language, because even in this case people will never be a fluent as they are in their native language. However, children who learn ASL are able to master the language, even when they learn from someone who does not sign properly. This is further evidence of the critical period, because if children are able to fill in the gaps that they are not taught, there must be some innateness language acquisition.

Biological Understanding

I was outside yesterday playing tag while babysitting for three little girls of the ages 4, 6, and 10. The youngest girl ran across a feather lying on the ground and picked it up to show the rest of us. Immediately after telling her sisters about the amazing find she had just made, both girls began to scold her and warn her of the diseases the feather contains. The six year old repeated that birds are dirty while the ten year old shrieked that she would catch the "bird flu" from the feather. After struggling to aruge that she had touched feathers before and not gotten sick, the four year old finally dropped the feather and ran into the house crying that she didn't want the "bird disease." Each of these children displays a different level of understanding of the biological process and is at a different stage of her mental development.
According to the criteria for biological understanding outlined in the chapter, Conceptual Development, the ten year old displays a clear understanding that germs can be found on matter from other living creatures and can cause illness. This is a concept she states, "Mom said," implying that her knowledge of feathers causing diseases is a nurtured concept passed on from her mother. She does not connect it with being a disgusting object but simply something undesirable to touch in order to avoid the consequences. The six year old understands the concept of illness, but is still having trouble distinguishing between biological reactions and emotional reactions. She believes that the feather is "yucky" and is therefore going to make her sick. She is however able to distinguish between the yucky-ness of the feather and the yucky-ness of green beans. The feather is found outdoors and is from a living creature that may carry germs. Green beans are yucky because they taste bad but they will not give you a disease if you eat them. Finally, the four year old displays a fairly naive understanding of illness. First, she believes in the "all or none" scenario where if she has touched one feather and not gotten sick she can therefore touch all feathers without getting sick. Once her sisters are able to persuade her to think differently, she thinks she will become immediately sick and begins to cry. She has no conceptual knowledge of the slow development of illnesses and the process of how germs pass.
The biological cue that all three children and their mother misinterpreted is that most diseases cannot pass from birds to humans becuase of the genetic basis of disease. Just as dogs with illnesses do not generally get their owners sick, disease carried by birds generally cannot cause humans to become ill. Such knowledge is not widely known in the general public and often causes scares such as the "bird flu" paranoia that circulated several years ago. Such differences in the level of biological understanding cause me to think that the majority of this type of conceptual development is due to nurture. People are not predetermined to learn false information about biology. We learn the majority of our knowledge of how the world works through teaching and through direct experience with the world. We must observe and test our own theories in nature everyday so we continually nurture the concept of biological processes.

World without Development

In the first part of the week, we talked about children’s conceptual and theory development in class. Conceptual development basically helps children make sense of the world. I think it is critical to have concepts develop in us; I thought about a world where people living there do not have conceptual development, and it was very different. People would never be able to group things together into categories, such as having bats and humans all called mammal, and also would not understand that all members in a category share some common features. In the world without conceptual development, I imagine that people would often be confused and have curiosity. Since people cannot category things according to their features, they would need to examine every new things each time they encounter a new object. For example, seeing other people from other parts of the world, they would not be able to tell right away that they are human as well, since people from different parts of the world may not look exactly the same. Thus, it would be time consuming to live in a world without conceptual development; we would need to spend a lot more time in our lives on just simple examine each and every objects that we see.

In the second part of the week, we talked about reasoning and problem solving. I believe that this is another big step in children’s development. Come to think of it, basically almost everything we do in our daily life is related with reasoning and problem solving. For example, when driving a car, we need to solve the problem of where we are going and what road should I take to get there; when writing a blog, we need to first understand the material, and solve the problem and reason out of what we want to write about. Thus, a world where people have no reasoning and problem solving skills would probably be malfunctioning and dangerous.

essentialism

Something that struck me as interesting in this weeks classes was Susan Gelman’s idea about essentialism. The idea that within a category there is some underlying “essence” that is universally true for members of said category. I think this theory is very applicable to children’s problem solving, and categorization, and is even evident in adult ways of thinking. The underlying essence is not something that can necessarily be named. For example cats and dogs share a number of different features, from the role they play in people’s lives to their physical appearance, yet we are very comfortable differentiating between them. For example, my mom has a Great Dane, who is very similar prototypical dog in appearance and behavior, my best friend has two cats who are very similar to the prototypical cat, and my sister has a toy poodle who looks and acts more like my friend’s cats than my mom’s dog (similar to the bat and bird example used in class). She is little and soft, she sits on laps, she jumps up on things most dogs wouldn’t be allowed to, and even eats out of cat dishes and wears cat collars because of her size. Yet we call my sister’s poodle (Tobie) a dog, not a cat. Of course, as adults we can look at Tobie and say that she was breed from larger dogs to be little, looking at the Standard poodle that she was breed down from and we can point to her genealogy to prove that she is in fact a dog, not a cat. The essentialism article talks about this kind of adult categorization; “Adults sometimes refrain from classifying together things that seem superficially the same but in theory-relative properties” (343). But little kids can’t do things, and none of them label her as a cat. This implies that there is something about Tobie’s essence that is canine, because her being categorized, by children, as a dog is obviously not based on her looks or behavior. In fact, Gelman points out that while children do this, they might not be able to tell you why they do. They would consistently call Tobie a dog, but if asked why Tobie is a dog, not a cat, they might have a hard time coming up with an answer. The Gelman et al article states that adults and especially children will sometimes use the theory-based classification without knowing the theory, and this accounts for why they can’t always explain why they categorized something the way they did. According to the article, essences don’t have to be observable at all, this is certainly true in the Tobie example, the reading used the example of a whale not being a fish.
There was some dispute in the essentialism article about whether or not adults still categorize things like this. I think that they do, at least to a certain extent. It is a more modernist perspective to use this type of cemented thinking, that there is some underlying defining feature in any classification. While it might be important in childhood classification, it can quickly become a limiting way of thinking in adulthood. If one doesn’t allow more fluidity in categorization they can make unfortunate assumptions that can lead to problems. For example race or gender issues. If people believe these constructs to be more concretely defined we may run into problem of unfair grouping, or the exclusion of members that don’t fit in to any category. Essentialist thinking can lead to misguided thinking. We talked about some anecdotal examples in class about thinking you will get personality traits of an organ donor, or believing that people of one race are more genetically different from another race, but these and other examples of essentialist thinking in adults can be dangerous. It can lead to assumptions about abilities biased on race, gender, or some other category one might happen to be a part of. Postmodernism has tried to combat this way of thinking, but more work is needed. It is important to think about where we get these types of ideas, because I would bet we are all guilty of categorizing things and assuming things based on our categorization, with little proof to support our assumptions. It is really interesting how something that is so important in childhood can linger into adulthood in a less positive way.

Defining-Features Representations Restored.

When my cousin, Samuel, was two or three years old, he thought that all Daddies were Indian, and all Mommies were Chinese. At first glance, this might seem like a really strange idea to have, but it’s really not all that surprising. The thing is, my father is Indian, and on his side of the family I have two uncles, one of whom is my cousin’s father. All three of them (my father and both uncles) married Chinese women and so all my cousins are “Chindians”, as we’re called in Malaysia. Thus, in the early years of his life, Samuel would have come into contact with mainly Indian Daddies and Chinese Mommies, which led to his unusual conclusion.

Samuel wasn’t only exposed to relatives growing up – he met other Mommies and Daddies too. Therefore he would’ve met other Daddies and Mommies who weren’t Indian and Chinese respectively. However, he spent most of his time within his nuclear and extended family, so the “being Indian” feature was a high cue validity for Daddies, as was the “being Chinese” feature for Mommies. As he grew up, he began to learn what exactly makes a Mommy and a Daddy. He was taught that anyone who had children was a Mommy is she was a girl, and a Daddy if he was a boy. Despite the fact that he was still mainly exposed to his nuclear and extended family, he now knew that race does not have a causal relationship with Mommy- and Daddyhood. His categories of Daddies and Mommies were both broadened and limited by this new information that he now had, and were also more accurate.

My point to this analogy is that the three theories of conceptual representations need not be seen as mutually exclusive, but can instead be combined to form a single continuous and dynamic theory of how children’s conceptual representations develop. While probabilistic representations and theory-based representations are seen to complement each other, the defining-features representations theory is often deemed too basic and therefore obsolete. I beg to differ – I think the defining-features theory might very well be the culmination of children’s conceptual representations.

Going back to my analogy, Samuel first used probabilistic representations to form his categories of Daddies and Mommies. He could not have used defining features, as he was exposed to parents of other races, neither could he have used theory-based representations because he did not know what caused a person to be a Mommy or a Daddy. The second step in Samuel’s representations of Mommies and Daddies was theory-based – he learnt what “made” Mommies and Daddies. Based on what he learnt, he could then form defining features of Mommies and Daddies – Mommies were girls who had children, and Daddies were boys who had children.

Mommies and Daddies aside, this process of forming conceptual representations can be seen in many other instances. Under the Naïve Biology theory, for example, children first start off by categorizing living and non-living objects based on motion. Most of the things they are exposed to early in life that aren’t alive don’t move – their teddy bear, their blanket, and their bottle, for instance. They would almost definitely have some experience with plants, and might even be told that the plant is alive and can die. However, as the vast majority of inanimate objects they experience are non-living, non-motion is a high cue validity for non-living objects and thus their categories of living and non-living objects are formed.

Later on, they are taught either formally or informally about what exactly makes living things “alive”. They learn about respiration, reproduction and nutrition, to name a few, that is causally related with “alive-ness”. Using these theory-based representations, they then modify and possibly do away with the probabilistic representations they had, if need be, and identify the defining features that categorize living and non-living things. This categorization would be more accurate than the one formed using probabilistic representations.

One of the weaknesses that have been identified for defining-features representations is that there are some concepts that do not have defining features – I don’t think this is true because these defining features are there; it’s just a matter of learning what they are. Probabilistic representations, on the other hand, have the weakness of possibly being and remaining inaccurate if not coupled with theory-based representations. The two combined then result in defining-features representations, and so these two processes are in fact the way in which we learn what the defining features for a concept are.

In summary, with limited knowledge and experience, children use cue validities when faced with novel objects and experiences. When they gain more knowledge about those objects and experiences, they might be able to form theory-based representations which they can then use to form defining-features representations. If these defining-features representations coincide with their probabilistic representations, all the better, but if they don’t, then the defining-features representations take precedence. This proves the relevance, and indeed the superiority, of defining-features representations over probabilistic and theory-based representations.

critical period

Sarah Ennis

Lennenberg’s hypothesis in 1967 proposed a critical period for language learning. He inferred that infants must be exposed to their a language within a window of time, beginning early in infancy until puberty when the lateralization of the brain is complete, in order to properly learn language. At the time Lennenberg proposed this theory little evidence was available to support this claim. Over the years however, researchers have collected plenty of convincing evidence that support the notion of a critical period of language acquisition.

I think some of the most compelling evidence for a critical period besides the Nicaraguan Sign Language discussed in class is study by Johnson and Newport (1989), which examined the grammatical abilities of Chinese and Korean immigrants. The immigrants in this study ranged from 3 to 39 years of age. All of the immigrants had been living in the U.S. between 3 and 26 years. Each individual was tested on his or her grammatical mastery of the English language. The results indicated that immigrants who came before age 7 knew as much grammar as a native-born adult. Those who came between the ages of 8 and 10 knew it slightly less well; those who came 11 to 15 knew it somewhat less well; and only a few of those who came after the age of 15 acquired any grammar skill at all (Johnson & Newport, 1989). This remarkable study demonstrates that universally a critical period likely exists in order to learn language. It could be said that this study only demonstrates the likelihood of properly learning a second language and cannot be compared to learning an initial first language. However, because those individuals who migrated to the U.S. before the age of 7 scored comparable to native speaking adults this explanation is likely untrue.

It is easy to imagine how it would affect a child who is not exposed to any language at an early age if in fact a critical period does exist. There have been few instances when this phenomenon has unfortunately occurred. Like these instances, a child who is not exposed to language during a critical period will struggle with the ability to learn critical abilities like writing or the ability to acquire knowledge in school. The inability to master these two skills would especially impair the success of the child immediately and also later in life. Furthermore, children who do not properly acquire language would be unable to participate in a critical part of development: socialization. They would struggle with how to communicate or form relationships with others.

Language is the foundation for our ability to function, survive, and adapt to our environment. It the tool that gets us to where we want to go. Without it our opportunities to flourish in life and social relationships are greatly impaired. The overwhelming evidence supporting a critical period is important when we consider what can occur if we are unable to learn language.

Problem Solving Dilemmas

In reading through chapter 10 of our book, and studying how children develop problem solving skills, I’ve been reflecting on how my own experiences relate. As depicted in the examples in the book, not all learning occurs on its own, developing over time; much of learning takes place through explicit teaching and learning from parents and teachers, not just general familiarization with the world around us. One glaring example for myself is that of the balance scales experiments – I would solve these problems following the Rule III model, even though I am (partially) college educated. I got a D- in high school physics, and have never been very good at any sort of physical reasoning; the mathematics surrounding such problems still just goes over my head. In the more complex questions, I find myself relying on semi-educated guesses. On the other hand, I think I got around a 500 on the English section of the SAT test back in the 8^th grade (my mom made me take it), largely from a boost from the (now-obsolete) analogy questions. I understand language-related problems much more competently than mathematic ones. Where along my schooling did such a divergence in talents occur, or was this pre-determined? Nature vs. nurture rears her ugly head again.

On a side note, I’m somewhat bothered by the well-educated authors’ repeated misuse of the word “metaphor”. I understand that these are most likely psychology instructors, and may have not taken an English class since high school, but an editor should have noticed. “A camera is like a tape recorder” is a simile, not a metaphor, as is the “child as scientist” comparison. As many may remember from back in middle school, the presence of “like” or “as” makes these phrases similes, not metaphors. This demonstrates my own inability to efficiently encode information, as inconsequential things like this catch my attention, not always the relevant content of the text.

gender theory and children

Gelman (1994) maintains that children may “learn the “theory-based classification” before they learn the theory” (143). That they may know before to which system an item or object belongs before they know why it belongs to that particular group. This suggests that children know a lot about the world on an unconscious level. When discussing Keil’s belief that different transformations impact children’s idea of what is innate in identity we discussed two different types of transformations that may occur. One is a costume change and another being an operation change. It was found that children as young as four can identify that a costume change does not change the identity of an object.

They found that children believed that an operation would change the identity of an object. However, it was discussed that children are not as good at identifying gender as a stable identity. Children will tend to believe that changing the clothing of an individual changes their gender. Possible explanations for why this was the case included that gender is a unique category that may not be treated as a natural kind because gender cuts across many different categories of animals. I believe that there is perhaps another way of looking at why children have a difficult time believing gender to be a stable identity. I believe that they are correct when they maintain that it is not a stable identity and that essentially gender is rooted in biological sex it has been covered with many different “costumes”. For example, most people believe that what determines gender is the chromosomes one is born with, this is largely correct of sex but not of gender. Sex is determined by the chromosomes one is born with, xx or xy, but we know that even on a chromosomal level it is not always this clear people are often born with three chromosomes and different combinations of chromosomes. People may argue that people with differences in their chromosomes are the result of mutations and that the “standard” is to either have xx or xy, that is true but sex is far more complicated than just chromosomes. Sex, or at least genital development is also determines by hormones. There are people in the world with xy chromosomes that appear to be female on the outside because they have an insensitivity to the “male” hormones that allow a person to develop male genitals. There are many other variations of “intersex” individuals who contain elements of male and female genitalia. But beyond mere biology which determines sex there is also a wide range of hormone levels in every individual. Some “men” have more testosterone than other biological “men” and some women have more hormones than other women. Women also often have differing amounts of “male” hormones in their bodies. Gender is separate from sex in many different ways, gender is the public image of ones sex. A person may have testes inside and a vagina and breast on the outside or maybe they take steps to change their appearance on the outside to match how they feel on the inside, such as transsexuals. There are plenty of “tomboys” and effeminate men, both of which do not fit the traditional standards of gender. Therefore maybe young children are seeing a sort of “theory based classification” to which the rest of us are simply unaware there is a theory to. Perhaps gender is not as stable an identity that we like to imagine and it is covered in many “costumes” such as hormones and clothing and socialized behaviors and beliefs.

Essentialism, concepts, and surprises.

Schemas, stereotypes, concepts, theories, beliefs. These are all terms which have been mentioned in class discussion to help explain how we, as humans, group objects, people, and events in the world into efficient categories. Certainly no one expects all of these concepts to be completely correct, but it is amazing that we can even develop such an elaborate network of theories about the world and how it works. It is interesting to note that these concepts are often formed based on what is most useful to us, rather than what is correct. As children, and even adults, explore the world, they find ample evidence to establish categories, and to refine the catogories they have already established. The theory of essentialism suggests that we believe animals and objects have a deep, true "nature" or "essence" that makes them what they are. As I will elaborate later, it is interesting to think about how contradictory evidence about the "nature" of a category might prompt us to wrestle with our concepts.
So how do we develop these concepts, or theories in the first place? The classic "defining features" view suggests that each concept or category has a set of necessary and sufficient attributes that its members must have to belong to that category ("necessary" means it is a required attribute, and "sufficient" means that the given attributes define the category). While this seems simple enough, one finds that it can be difficult to categorize certain items, or to label which attributes separate different categories. The "probabilistic" view suggests that we group members into a category using cue validities, or how predictive an attribute is of one category compared to another category. If a member has strong cue validities, it is typical; the basic level is the category level at which cue validities are greatest. We use the terms for basic level categories most often in everyday language (i.e. car, dog, flower v. volkswagen, terrier, daisy). But what is the underlying reason of category membership? The "theory" view explains this, and can be viewed in conjunction with the "probabilistic" view. The theory view suggests that there are causal explanations for why members belong to a certain group. The "theory" theory extends a form of this idea to all of cognitive development, stating that children are "little scientists" who develop and revise their theories based on their experience. One explanation of the nature of these theories is Essentialism. Whew, that was a bit long.
Okay, so back to Essentialism. There is ample evidence that both children and adults use essentialism as they create and manage concepts. For example, young children, who are generally very sensitive to perceptual stimuli, will attribute the characteristic of a category member to a new animal, rather than the characteristic of a perceptually similar animal (bird v. bat study). Adults assumed that people of the same race would always have more similar DNA that people of different races (DNA compared to essence). From personal experience, I would say that essentialism can often be applied to more complex concepts as well, such as social or religious groups, topics of study, etc., in addition to natural things and artifacts. I often will find evidence to contradict a new concept I've developed, and find myself asking (not in so many words perhaps), "Well, if this new information is true, what really is a ____?" This question reflects the crux of essentialism: that a true "essence" exists for everything, even if we don't know what it is. As I find new information, I revise my theory of what the category's "essence" is, but even if new information contradicts my theory, I just alter my theory. I don't discard the assumption that the essence exists.

BladeRunner

Since we have been talking about essences I haven’t been able to stop thinking about BladeRunner. Besides it being a really good movie for the time, it brings up a lot of what we have been discussing. It’s set in the future, and robotic technology has gotten to the point were just by looking at “someone” you can’t tell whether they are human or a robot. Harrison Ford’s job in the movie is to seek out robots that are posing as humans and destroy them, but it turns out that he is a robot too. Now from what I can remember the reason that robots had to be hunted in the first place was because some of them had been flagged as dangerous and had a predisposition to kill. The reason I’m bringing all this up is that in addition to our ability to use both physical and mental tools problem-solve setting us apart from other animals, I think this possibly makes us stand out just as much. In a round about way we discuss this ability all the time in class, like when we talked about pragmatics in language. The most successful among us, with some exceptions, knows to take what they are presented with a grain of salt and not be fooled by outward appearances. Lower animals clearly don’t have this, that monkey that clung to a wire frame its mother with a cloth wrapped around it is a good example. Or maybe it’s just that we are a lot more sensitive differences. I say more sensitive because there are clearly situations where we can be fooled, even by ourselves. Movies touch on these sorts of themes all the time. The Matrix was a whole world that perfectly mimicked the real thing, but the reality for those people was horribly different. All of this is interesting because it seems like we may have at least one part instilled in our biology, and that’s the longing for honesty, and genuine interactions. The reason that Picasso’s paintings are so valued above a copy is because it’s scary to think that we too could be replaced. Being self-aware we know that we are one of a kind, so we transfer this to the important things and people around us. Maybe the reason we are this way and we have this ability is because it makes us more conserving and protective of what we value the most.

Children's understanding of Biology

Children differ in the their understanding of living and dead. They do not grasp the concept of being dead the same way adults do, which requires abstract thinking. Children view death as a departure in which someone leaves but they may return. They do not understand that death is irreversable and that it's part of a life cycle. To them death is also assimilated with sleep from where one can awake.
Psychoanalytics comment that preschoolers lack a biological understanding of death, meaning that young children do not see death as inevitable or irreversible. Piaget's concept of death confirms that children do not have a good understanding of death and life until about the age of 10 in which they are better able to understand what makes something alife.
Researchers that follow Piaget's tradition suggest that changes in children's understanding of death forms from transitions from preoperational to concrete operational and from formal operational stages of cognitive development.

In the preoperational stage children beleive that death is reversible but not until the concrete operational stage do they grasp the concept that death is irreversible. In the concrete operational stage they do not understand that death is part of our life cycle and that all living things must die at some point in time. The final stage, the formal operational stage allows abstract thinking and it is in this stage that we are able to grasp the whole concept of living vs dead.

Living vs Nonliving : Children do understand that animals and humans are both living things but they have a hard time grasping the concet that plants are also living things. Later in school they learn that what makes something alive is being able to reproduce and grow. School gives them the opportunity to care for animals and plants and there they learn what it takes for something to grow and live. In class we have talked about the essentialim theory, I find this theory very intersting. I think that it is amazing how from an early age we are able to know what is living and what is not and how we have an ability to classify things in groups without having much knowledge even though they may not always look alike.
We acquire our knowledge of non living and living things through learning in our environment as well from our deep understanding that we acquire even when we are little.

Essentialism

In learning about children’s conceptual development, I have been very intrigued with the concept of naïve biology, essentialism in particular. Part of the reason that I find it so intriguing is that it has been hard to completely wrap my mind around. The reason for this, I believe, is that essentialism plays a subconscious role in the development of concepts and is, therefore, something that people take for granted. That is, children seem to innately possess ideas that “categories of things in the world have a true, underlying nature or essence that causes things to be in particular categories,” which is Susan Gelman’s definition of essentialism.
I also found the evidence of essentialism to be very interesting. This evidence shows that children are able to form and hold concepts about various things without having any prior knowledge about the particular concept. The first piece of evidence, inductive potential, the ability of young children (4 and 5 year olds) to group things into categories even though a member of a category may appear as if it belongs to as different category, supports the notion that very young children have an innate understanding that certain things belong to together in the same category because they share a certain essence.
Innate dispositions, a second piece of evidence of essentialism, involve the idea that nature is sometimes stronger than nurture. In other words, young children are able to recognize that you cannot change the disposition of something, such as an animal, by taking it out of its natural environment and rearing it somewhere else. Innate dispositions suggest that young children possess the ability to accurately predict the behavior of a particular organism based on an innate understanding of the nature of that organism.
The third piece of evidence that we discussed was maintenance of identity, which shows that children seem to understand for the most part that you cannot change the identity of an organism or an object by disguising it. However, younger children have some difficulty realizing that you cannot change the identity of an organism by operating on that object. The ability of children to recognize that you cannot change the identity of an object or organism by making superficial changes to it once again shows that children have an innate understanding that the identity of things do not change by altering them superficially.
Essentialism proves to be a useful because it allows people to hold an idea about a particular object or organism without knowing exactly why the object or organism is the way it is. However, essentialism can also produce and perpetuate false concepts. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that from a very young age children are able to understand their surrounding world based on their knowledge of the underlying essence of the objects and organisms around them.

Essences and children

The topic that I would like to focus on for this week’s blog has to do with essences and what children know about them. Just as a refresher, essences determine the shared underlying structure of category members. Different researchers have noted that children have some understanding of this idea when they are very young (four years old). However, their development of using essences does not fully develop until later. This brings me to the Frank Keil study. His study wanted to see whether or not children would label something as “changed” or the “same” based on different transformations. There were two types of transformations: costumes and operations. There were two types of objects: natural kinds and artifacts. When Keil performed this study he found that four year olds think that if an object (or animal) has an operation, then it is changed. He also found that second graders will label an artifact as changed from an operation but they will not accept a change if it was performed on a natural thing. This shows that as children develop, their understanding about essences gradually grows. I just have a hard time believing that children at the age of four really understand this. Also there have been some researchers that have thought that this may be innate. I do not agree with this either. They say that preschoolers can distinguish between traits that are more likely to be nature or nurture. I think that children are learning these abilities. A four year old has some knowledge about this because from Keil’s study, we can suggest that four year olds understand that costumes do not change something. But for this to be innate, wouldn’t they have to know that operations do not change it either? They still accept transformations on artifacts by the time they are in the second grade. It just seems that they have more experience with these things, and that is why their development of this is more gradual. One thing that I would like to know more about is whether or not children use any other heuristics at young ages. I took the cognition class last spring. We talked about many different heuristics that we use every day. Since essentialism is a heuristic, I think it would be very helpful to compare whether or not children use other heuristics. One last thing that I think would help shed more light on this subject would be to test what children say about humans and transformations. I would like to know what children would say about a human that got an operation. It almost seems that children can understand essences when they have had experiences with it before. We talked in class about how most children know that a costume does not change who you are because of Halloween. They have had contact with using costumes and dressing up. Something that many children have not experienced at a young age is operations. Of course there are also many children that have had operations at a young age, but I think it would be interesting to have a study that includes children that have had operations at a young age. Would they be able to understand that an operation does not change “you?”

Losing but Learning

The process of learning for a child has many steps to it and many factors. One thing that is embedded in my head after all that we have learned about child development refers back to the way infants scan faces; the process of sub-cortical information developing into cortical information due to suppression. This is simply an example of what I’m trying to get across, which is the point that children have to use different types of perceptual and intellectual narrowing and inhibitory controls to be able to reach adult cognitive levels.
An example of the importance of suppressing a variable to get a better understanding of the whole picture would be Deloache’s study concerning symbolic development and dual representations. Deloache refined one of her experiments by prohibiting her subjects from physically touching or playing with the model, her reason being “that playing with and manipulating the model would make it more salient as an object hence would make dual representation more difficult to achieve.” (Deloache, 111) She “reasoned that denying children access to the model would decrease its salience as an object, hence making it easier for them to achieve dual representation.” (Deloach, 111) This goes with the idea of suppressing one aspect of cognition to help increase the chances of a child’ s ability to look beyond the surface. The study done by Markman on the topic of the mutual exclusivity assumption displays the difficulty children have accepting that one item can be two different things because of their assumption that a particular item cannot be called something else. In this case children had to suppress their prior knowledge and be open to the idea that particular things had more than one title (e.g. a dog can also be called a pet) Another example that was shown in class is the process of developing a means ends analysis, which is the ability to form subgoals that temporarily take you further from your goal in order to ultimately get closer to it (inhibitory control). This would relate to solving a rubik’s cube and having to take two steps backwards to reach the final product.
Real life examples of things in our daily lives that are lost or refined to adults compared with children are the abilities to play with no worries, to imagine and to pretend. These are some things that are ultimately suppressed because of our social environment and as children grow older they mature and lose some of their childlike characteristics. Ultimately children have to suppress and refine some of their characteristics and the way they perceive the world to make the transition into adulthood. Whether it be done through social learning or the process of coming to a better understanding of their surroundings and what it entails.

Young Male and Female Differences

Although the Declaration of Independence states “…all [people] are created equal,” there are early male and female differences. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the “Father” of psycho-analytical thought, who theorized a mental/cognitive “psyche,” professed the psyche as made up of an “id, ego, and super-ego.” Firstly, the “id” (representative of want/desire), the “ego” (what a person expresses that they are able or can), and the “super-ego,” or (ultimately what should be).

Is a one-year-old’s choice of two cookies over one (male and female) a manifestation of a Freudian psyche? Is it relative to the “id,” because a youngster “wants” more cookies? Or is it more relative to the “ego,” because they can eat two cookies not just one? Or is it pre-/sub- super-egotism that they should respond in that manner because they are being tested.

What about the difference, relative to hormones (testosterone – male/estrogen – female) affecting the brain? Some say the main differentiating factor of a brain (male to female) are hormones. This is manifested in approximately one-year olds wherein a female can see the difference, not only between one’s and two’s (male and female), pretty much equally but also three’s and four’s (feminine way better performance than male at one year).

Freud spoke of male dominance and female envy. I feel that the “dominant” male one year old’s “psyche” feels more satiated and masculine with an equilibration and that one year old males, choosing cookies, feel they don’t need to expend the “psyche” metabolism (they don’t even see) four cookies over three. Contrapositively, a FEMININE one year old is not as dominant/satisfied/satiated and can be deficitual and envious, therefore more “psyche” metabolism, therefore a better “set” (term for expectation in the future) to compute, recognize and desire four cookies rather than three whereas the male one year old, ah, just doesn’t see the difference. The female one year olds seem to be quicker thinkers; the male one year olds slower thinkers.
In the experiment done as a necessary reading for class, the female one year olds are “dominant” in their ability to differentiate bigger numbers (three’s and four’s), and males lesser. Perhaps “estrogen” causes a one year old brain to metabolize more sugar and oxygen needed to accomplish this task of recognizing three’s and four’s, whereas the “testosterone” one year old “stays put” with less glucose and oxygen expenditure (less “psyche’ usage). If the one year old male was to see the one year old female after the choices of cookies with more cookies than him (male, choose: 2,2,3,2; when shown 2’s and 3’s four times, female, choose: 3,3,3,3; when shown 2’s and 3’s four times)…therefore nine cookies for the male/twelve cookies for the female. The male might be envious and the female dominant, a reciprocation of Freud’s designation. Males aren’t inherently dominant, females aren’t always envious. There’s lots of female dominance.