The Development of Inductive Inference and Categorization: Psychological essentialism in preschool children

Hyekyung Park; Geunyoung Kim

THE KOREAN JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

2018, 31(1), pp.25-49
Publisher : The Korean Society For Developmental Psychology
Research Area : Psychological Science

Hyekyung Park ¹, Geunyoung Kim ²

¹서강대학교
²서강대학교

ABSTRACT

The goal of the present study was to investigate the effect of category label, properties and visual appearance on children’s reasoning during inductive inference and categorization. A property inference task and a categorization task were used to examine the effects of category label and properties. The results based on the data collected from 71 4-and 5-year-old children and 20 adults indicated that the participants’ reasoning was more category-based during the property inference task than during the categorization task. However, this tendency was not significant when the properties were highly familiar. Perceptual cues played a strong role in the categorization task when categorizing arbitrary categories compared to natural categories, but this was not the case during the property inference task. The results also showed that older participants tended to use conceptual information (category labels and properties) more than did younger participants, regardless of tasks and domains. These findings indicate that category labels have higher inductive potential compared to properties in human reasoning, and that even young children may consider conceptual information as main information that may override other factors, such as perceptual similarity.
KEYWORDS

psychological essentialism, inductive inference, categorization
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