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Biomedical subjects

K Springer

Publications and source records attributed to K Springer.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1992

Children's awareness of the biological implications of kinship.

Preschoolers' thinking about kinship was explored by means of a simple induction task. A target animal was described as possessing a property, and children were asked whether each of 2 other animals shares the property or not. When no information about kinship was given, children in Experiment 1 based their inductions of biological properties on physical similarity. However, when kinship relations were specified, children judged that dissimilar-looking kin share more biological properties than similar-looking but unrelated members of the same species. In Experiment 2, describing the similar animals as socially related did not change the basic pattern of inductions obtained in the first experiment. Moreover, subjects in Experiment 3 did not induce more acquired physical and psychological properties among families than among unrelated animals. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 illustrate one case where young children favor a nonperceptible relation (kinship) over a perceptible one (similarity) as a basis for judgment. The overall pattern of data suggest that young children distinguish to some extent between the biological and social domains.

Awareness↗
PubMed1991

Early differentiation of causal mechanisms appropriate to biological and nonbiological kinds.

Although Piaget characterized young children as precausal until about 7-8 years of age, recent work indicates that preschoolers do honor fundamental principles of causality. This literature has mainly focused on general principles invoked in reasoning about mechanical events. By contrast, the present study examined whether children differentiate between the causal mechanisms appropriate for different conceptual domains. The results of 3 preliminary investigations and 1 main experiment suggested that preschoolers prefer natural mechanisms for color inheritance in biological kinds, particularly when causal substrates resemble their consequences. By contrast, the same children recognized the importance of human intentions in producing the color of an artifact, and also judged that mechanical mechanisms serve to mediate between intentions and outcomes. The results are relevant to recent studies on the development of biological thought, and overall suggest that early causal reasoning reflects both domain-specific and domain-general principles.

Child↗
PubMed1990

The relation between syllable number and visual complexity in the acquisition of word meanings.

Four experiments were conducted to explore the correlation between syllable number and visual complexity in the acquisition of novel words. In the first experiment, adult English speakers invented nonsense words as names for random polygons differing in visual complexity. Visually simple polygons received names containing fewer syllables than visually complex polygons did. In addition, analyses of English word-object pairings indicated that a significant correlation between syllable number and visual complexity exists in the English lexicon. In Experiments 2 and 3, adult English speakers matched monosyllabic novel words more often than trisyllabic novel words with visually simple objects, whereas trisyllabic matches were more common for visually complex objects. Experiment 4 replicated these findings with children, indicating that the assumption of a correlation between word and visual complexity exists during the period of intense vocabulary growth. Although the actual correlation between syllable number and visual complexity is small, other posited constraints on word meaning are also limited in strength. However, an increasing number of small, language-specific word-meaning correlations are being uncovered. Given the documented ability of speakers to detect and use these subtle correlations, we argue that a more fruitful approach to word-meaning acquisition would forgo the search for a few broad, powerful word-meaning constraints, and we attempt to uncover individually weak, but perhaps jointly powerful word-meaning correspondences.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

On the development of biologically specific beliefs: the case of inheritance.

5 experiments investigated children's intuitions about genetic transmission of features. After parent animals possessing an abnormal feature were described, children were asked whether their baby would be born with that feature in abnormal or normal form. Features were either internal or external, inborn or acquired after birth, and had functional or nonfunctional consequences for the parents. Among preschoolers, features with functional consequences were considered inherited much more frequently than any other type, but only when the functional consequences were biological rather than social or psychological. Older children demonstrated more awareness of the inheritance of inborn traits. Overall, the results suggest young children have principled, specifically biological notions of inheritance.

Child↗
PubMed1976

Tissue chemical analysis with muonic x rays.

The stopped muon channel at the Clinton P. Anderson Meson Physics Facility was used as a source of muons for studying the elemental composition of tissue via muonic x rays. The x-ray spectra from several types of tissue were used to determine the amounts of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen present. These determinations agree with the results of more conventional chemical analysis. Muonic x rays offer a noninvasive technique for determining the amounts of the more abundant elements in selected regions of the body.

Animals↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Concomitant syndactyly and polydactyly in a pediatric foot.

Syndactyly and polydactyly in a child may warrant surgical treatment to avert resultant emotional and psychologic problems. The authors present a unique case report of a bilateral polydactyly of the hallux and bilateral syndactyly of the second and third toes in a normal 6-year-old Hispanic female. The article will discuss the surgical management of these problems, using the skin harvested from resection of the extra hallux for the adjacent side of the lesser toes after desyndactyly.

Abnormalities, Multiple↗