Biomedical subjects

G Gutheil

Publications and source records attributed to G Gutheil.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1998

Do houseflies think? Patterns of induction and biological beliefs in development.

A current debate within the cognitive development literature addresses how best to characterize conceptual change. Within one proposal, development primarily consists of a series of radical conceptual shifts or restructurings in which the most current understanding is inexplicable within (incommensurate with) prior conceptual structure. Alternatively, development is discussed as more gradual enrichment of multiple existing early explanatory systems, allowing for commensurability over time and change. This paper examines the literature in this debate with specific focus on naive biological understanding, and discusses a series of studies on preschoolers' inductive inferences across biological and non-biological kinds. Children were taught a series of biological properties for a human being (e.g. eating, sleeping etc.), and asked to generalize these properties to both biological (e.g. dogs, worms) and non-biological kinds (e.g. clouds, tables). The results of these studies support the gradual-enrichment proposal. Specifically, 4-year-olds seem to possess limited, but coherent and independent biological theory which may form the basis of mature understanding of biological kinds. These results are discussed in terms of multiple explanatory systems which both preschoolers and adults can employ across development to effectively guide their decisions within a given domain.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed1997

Children's use of sample size and diversity information within basic-level categories.

Category-based induction involves making decisions about some member(s) of a category based on information concerning other category members. Recent studies indicate that although adults make use of information concerning sample size (larger samples are a stronger basis of inference than smaller samples) and sample diversity (more diverse samples are better than more homogeneous samples) when making category-based inductive judgments, children do not do so until age 8 or 9 and even then to only a limited degree. This research however, was conducted at the superordinate level of categorization, and it is unclear if general difficulty with this category level may have masked children's ability to use size and diversity, or if these results represent a more entrenched conceptual difficulty in using this information. We therefore conducted three studies that investigate both 8- and 9-year-olds' and adults' ability to use sample size and diversity within basic level categories. Our results indicate that children's difficulty with this information is independent of category level, and may be based on preferences for other strategies concerning category membership and perceptual similarity.

Child↗

PubMed1992

The development of category-based induction.

In a category-based induction, knowing that a property is true of some category members leads one to conclude that the property is true of other category members. An example is: Cardinals have ulnar arteries. Therefore hawks have ulnar arteries. Recently, Osherson et al. (1990) demonstrated a number of phenomena involving category-based inductions, and proposed that these phenomena can be explained by variations in 2 processes: (a) the similarity between the premise category (cardinals in the above example) and the conclusion category (hawks in the above example), and (b) the degree to which the premise category "covers" (roughly, is similar to) instances of the lowest-level category that includes both the premise and conclusion categories (birds in the above example). The present paper traces the developmental course of the relevant phenomena and of the similarity and coverage processes that presumably underlie them. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that the inductions made by kindergartners are sensitive only to the similarity between the premise and conclusion categories. Studies 3 and 4 showed that second graders' inductions are sensitive to both premise-conclusion similarity and coverage, as long as there is no need actually to use a generated category that includes both the premise and conclusion categories. These developmental findings reveal an orderly process in the growth of category-based inductions, and also decompose the Osherson et al. model into 3 basic components that have not previously been explicitly distinguished.

Animal Population Groups↗