Wk10 Live lecture Flashcards
What are 3 categories of objects?
Inanimate objects
Animals
People
How do children distinguish between animals and people?
People are like animals but they are similar to us, they have mental states, and display people-specific behaviours
How do children distinguish between inanimate objects and animals?
Animals move, eat, drink, and breathe etc.
What evidence did Ricard and Allard provide in support for children’s understanding of separate categories of objects?
Found that 9/10 month old infants behaved differently in the different conditions.
They would approach and touch the inanimate objects/live rabbit.
They would smile at the unfamiliar person.
They would attend more to the person/rabbit than the toy.
Why would children attend more to the person/rabbit?
Living things capture their attention more and they monitored the live things more than the object because they behaved on their own accord.
What are categories based on?
Infants create categories based on how similar things look to each other (perceptual categorisation)
What does the term habituation refer to?
We look at the length of looking times of infants to understand what infants are interested in
What did Behl-Chadha find about 3/4 month infants categorisation in familiarisation and preferential tests?
Shorter looking times at pairs of familiar mammals. Suggests children are bored and everything they are seeing is part of the same category
Infants had longer looking times in the preference testing phase. Suggests that they look longer at an object from a novel category.
What did Landau (1998) find about how infants categorise objects between 2-3 years old?
Children base their categorisation decisions on shape rather than size or texture.
What are 3 levels of categories?
Basic
Superordinate
Subordinate
Can infants categorise objects using causal information?
Yes. Causal explanations of physical features can lead to better categorisation than physical descriptions alone.
When can children categorise objects?
Early in infancy
What is categorisation often based of in early infancy?
Perceptual similarities
How can older children categorise objects?
Children form more complicate category hierarchies and use verbal explanations and causal reasoning to inform category organisation
When can infants perceive causal connections between physical events?
6 months old - infants understand that moving objects can collide with stationary objects causing them to move.
Have blicket test studies found that toddlers can infer causal relations between things even if they aren’t shown direct information?
Yes. A study using a blicket detector test found that 24 month olds figured out how to turn the blicket detector on by placing the blicket on top of it.
What have findings from more complicated blicket tests found?
Children can hypothesise about inconsistent causal relations. Children who generated more causal function explanations engaged in more hypothesis-testing behaviours
Why might causal reasoning not always happen?
Children are prone to fantasy thinking when causal explanations are not obvious.
Thinking is not always logical.
Can children understand why events in the world occur from a young age?
Yes. By 6 months old infants are attentive to cause and effect relations between objects.
By 24 months, toddlers can infer causal relations based on indirect and probabilistic evidence
Can pre-schoolers demonstrate scientific thinking?
Yes, pre-schoolers can generate hypotheses to explain inconsistent cause and effect relations which shows scientific thought.
How do children begin to understand spatial information?
Crawling and toddling stimulates processing of spatial information
What did Hermer and Spelke do in their disorientation task?
They tried to disorientate toddlers.
The child would observe a toy hidden in the room. They were then spun around with their eyes covered.
What were the findings from the disorientation task?
Children used geometric cues (length of walls) to find the hidden object.
Different coloured walls confused this age groups - the children did not know where to find the toy.
What were the conclusions from Lingwood’s virtual maze study?
As children get older they can use landmarks to locate objects.
By 12 years old, children are good at learning complicated routes.