Inductive reasoning during infancy and early childhood

婴儿期和幼儿期的归纳推理

• 批准号: 194530-2006
• 负责人: Graham, Susan
• 金额: $ 1.81万
• 依托单位: University of Calgary
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2008-01-01 至 2009-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=392525
• 关键词: Inductive; reasoning; during; infancy; early

The development of the ability to reason inductively is a fundamental component of cognitive development. Put, briefly, inductive reasoning involves invoking the premise that things that are true for one exemplar of a category (e.g., the blue ball bounces) will hold true for other members of the same category (e.g., therefore all balls bounce). Thus, inductive reasoning allows children to generalize knowledge to new instances and new situations, resulting in increased cognitive efficiency and the opportunity to benefit from past experiences. During the last granting period, we discovered that infants as young as 12-months of age can reason inductively about novel objects. Moreover, we found that they would use shared object names to guide this process.   During the next granting period, we will explore the development of inductive abilities during infancy, and examine the role of language in guiding preschoolers' inductive inferences about novel categories. In three sets of studies, we will examine when inductive reasoning abilities emerge during infancy (Set 1);  explore the influence of naming in guiding infants' inductive inferences about nonobvious object properties (Set 2); and  examine the how language can help preschoolers learn which properties of objects are characteristic of a particular category and which properties are not (Set 3). The results of the proposed studies will offer important insights into these relatively understudied developmental phenomena and will advance our understanding of the interaction between linguistic and conceptual knowledge in early development.

归纳推理能力的发展是认知发展的基本组成部分。简而言之，归纳推理涉及一个前提，即一个类别的一个示例（例如，蓝球弹跳）的前提将对同一类别的其他成员（例如，所有球反弹）成立。这是归纳推理使儿童能够将知识推广到新实例和新情况，从而提高了认知效率，并有机会从过去的经验中受益。在最后一个授予期间，我们发现年轻的12个月大的婴儿可以归纳有关新物体的原因。此外，我们发现他们将使用共享对象名称指导此过程。在下一个授予期间，我们将探索婴儿期归纳能力的发展，并研究语言在指导学龄前儿童对新类别的归纳推论中的作用。在三组研究中，我们将检查何时在婴儿期（第1组）中出现归纳推理能力；探索命名在指导婴儿对非对象特性的归纳推断（集2）的影响；并检查语言如何帮助学龄前儿童学习对象的哪些特性是特定类别的特征，哪些属性不是（集3）。拟议的研究的结果将为这些相对理解的发展现象提供重要的见解，并将促进我们对早期发展中语言和概念知识之间相互作用的理解。