We found a match
Your institution may have rights to this item. Sign in to continue.
- Title
Prior knowledge and exemplar encoding in children's concept acquisition.
- Authors
Carmichael, Catherine A.; Hayes, Brett K.; Carmichael, C A; Hayes, B K
- Abstract
Three experiments examined how children's domain knowledge and observation of exemplars interact during concept acquisition and how exposure to novel exemplars causes revision of such knowledge. In Experiments 1 (N = 126) and 2 (N = 64), children aged 4 to 10 years were shown exemplars of fictitious animal categories that were either unrelated to, or consistent with, their prior knowledge in 25% or 75% of presented exemplars. In Experiment 3, children (N = 290) saw fictitious animal, artifact, or unfamiliar social categories that were either consistent or inconsistent with their prior knowledge in 20%, 40%, 60%, or 80% of exemplars. In the test, children made judgments about the likely co-occurence of features. In all experiments, prior knowledge and exemplar observation independently influenced children's categorization judgments. Utilization of prior knowledge was consistent across age and domain, but 10-year-olds were more sensitive to observed feature covariation. Training with larger categories increased the impact of observed feature covariation and decreased reliance on prior knowledge.
- Subjects
THEORY of knowledge; CONCEPTS in children; CHILD psychology
- Publication
Child Development, 2001, Vol 72, Issue 4, p1071
- ISSN
0009-3920
- Publication type
journal article
- DOI
10.1111/1467-8624.00335