How do children come to understand the relation between human and nonhuman animals? This relation... more How do children come to understand the relation between human and nonhuman animals? This relation is central to endeavors as diverse as scientific reasoning and spiritual practice. Recent evidence reveals that young children appreciate each of the two concepts – human and non-human animal. Yet it remains unclear whether they also appreciate that humans are indeed part of the animal kingdom. In this study, we adopt a cross-cultural, developmental perspective to examine children’s interpretation of fundamental biological concepts, focusing on children from three distinctly different US communities (urban European Americans; rural European Americans and rural Native Americans (Menominee) living on ancestral tribal lands) that vary in their habitual contact with the natural world and in their cultural perspective on the human-nonhuman animal relation. Using structured interviews, we trace 160 children’s understanding of concepts including ‘human,’ ‘mammal,’ and ‘animal’, and the relatio...
This chapter was originally published in the book The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol ... more This chapter was originally published in the book The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol 50, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author's institution, for noncommercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who know you, and providing a copy to your institution's administrator. All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institution's website or repository, are prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier's permissions site at:
Although attention models assume that the two subproblems of a discrimination shift are treated a... more Although attention models assume that the two subproblems of a discrimination shift are treated as a single problem, learning of a nonreversal shift can be broken down into performance on the subproblem that changes reward conditions and the one that does not, A general analysis of performance on these subproblems, appropriate to a broad range of attention models, is developed in this paper. This analysis leads to a rejection of attention models for some S populations, but shows that attention models may have been rejected prematurely for other populations of Ss.
We investigated the development of an understanding of the concept LIVING THING in 4-to 10-year-o... more We investigated the development of an understanding of the concept LIVING THING in 4-to 10-year-old monolingual children acquiring either English or Indonesian. In English, LIVING THING is comprised of two major constituent categories, ANIMAL and PLANT. However, the word animal has (at least) two senses, and these overlap in their scope. One sense of animal includes both humans and non-human animals; the other sense excludes humans and includes only non-human animals. In Indonesian, the constituents are organized differently: neither this overlapping category structure nor the polysemous use of animal exists. We consider the consequence of this cross-linguistic difference on acquisition, asking whether underlying category structure, coupled with the polysemy of the word animal, interferes with the acquisition of the concept ALIVE or LIVING THING. Using a Sorting Task, we compared English-and Indonesian-speaking children's ability to form a category that includes all and only LIV...
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific ... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. 1
Research in the field of learning sciences demonstrates that various forms of knowledge are creat... more Research in the field of learning sciences demonstrates that various forms of knowledge are created through participation in diverse but often undervalued community practices (Nasir, Rosebery, Warren, & Lee, 2006). However, knowledge created in practice is not traditionally explored in research about complex systems thinking (Duarte Olson, Forthcoming). This session seeks to recognize and capitalize on the wealth of complex systems knowledge learned through everyday practices in informal contexts. We present arguments that are grounded in research taking place in four different communities—with Brazilian samba schools, triathletes, Native Americans, and environmental educators. The goal of the symposium is to discuss (1) how complex systems thinking can be developed through different practices in informal environments, and (2) how an under-representation of diverse samples and phenomena may eschew our understanding of complex systems thinking.
Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per res... more Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing this collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden to Department of Defense, Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports (0704-0188), 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington, VA 22202-4302. Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to any penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number.
I begin by describing (in broad strokes) a collaborative research venture in which my colleagues ... more I begin by describing (in broad strokes) a collaborative research venture in which my colleagues and I have focused on the acquisition of folkbiologic knowledge. We adopt a cross-linguistic, cross-cultural view to ask a) what capacities young children bring to the task of acquisition and b) how the environment (including the objects and events that populate that child's world, the language used to describe them, and the cultural practices invoked to highlight them) shapes the process of acquisition. The work presented here focuses in children's construal of the concept 'alive' or 'living thing'. 1 After describing briefly the populations we have included thus far and our research strategy for identifying the contributions of language and culture in the acquisition of the concept 'alive', I offer evidence from 4-to 10-year-old children from the US, Indonesia, and Mexico. This work reveals important commonalities in early development and also illustrates an intimate connection between culture, language and conceptual organization in the evolution of knowledge. I close with a discussion of the advantages of combining psychological, linguistic and anthropologic methods. in developing theories.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2013
This study reports ethnographic and experimental analyses of inter-generational changes in native... more This study reports ethnographic and experimental analyses of inter-generational changes in native Itza' Maya and immigrant Ladino populations of Guatemala's Petén rainforest concerning understanding of ecological relationships between plants, animals, and humans, and the perceived role of forest spirits in sustaining these relationships. We find dramatic changes in understanding ecological relationships and the perceived role of forest spirits. Itza' Maya conceptions of forest spirits (arux) are now more often confounded with Ladino spirits (duendes), with Itza' spirits no longer reliably serving as forest guardians. These changes correlate with a shift in personal values regarding the forest, away from concern with ecologically central trees and towards monetary incentives. More generally, we describe how economic, demographic, and social changes relate to the loss of a system of beliefs and behaviours that once promoted sustainable agro-forestry practices. These changes coincide with open access to common pool resources. In this study we describe an ongoing research project on how different groups of agro-foresters in the lowland rainforest of Guatemala deal with a resource dilemma involving the forest itself. Using ethnographic and experimental methods we describe inter-generational changes in Itza' Maya and Ladino understandings of ecological relationships between plants, animals, and humans, and the perceived role of forest spirits in sustaining these relationships. While dealing with the conception of environment, this study also contributes to the perennial debate of nature versus culture. The subfield of ecological anthropology or French anthropologie de la nature is mainly interested in understanding the concept of nature as well as people's relation to nature. In recent years, ecological anthropology has been especially concerned theoretically and practically with environment policies, bs_bs_banner
This work focuses on the underlying conceptual structure of children’s category of living things ... more This work focuses on the underlying conceptual structure of children’s category of living things from a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic perspective. School-aged children (n= 129) from three Argentinean communities (rural Wichí-speaking, rural Spanish-speaking, urban Spanish-speaking) were asked to generate the names of living things. Analyses were focused on the typicality, semantic organization, and hierarchical level of the names mentioned. We identified convergences among the names generated by children in all three communities, as well as key differences: the typicality, habitats and hierarchical level of the categories mentioned varied as a function of children’s language and their direct experience with the natural world. These findings provide evidence concerning the role of language, culture and experience in shaping children’s folkbiological concepts.
Children's acquisition of fundamental biological concepts (LIVING THING, ANIMAL, PLANT) is sh... more Children's acquisition of fundamental biological concepts (LIVING THING, ANIMAL, PLANT) is shaped by the way these concepts are named. In English, but not Indonesian, the name “animal” is polysemous: One sense includes all animate objects, and the other excludes humans. Because names highlight object categories, if the same name (“animal”) points to two different, hierarchically related biological concepts, children should have difficulty settling on the scope of that term and its close neighbors (e.g.,“alive”). Experiments with 4- to 9-year-old English- and Indonesian-speaking children revealed that “alive” poses unique interpretive challenges, especially for English-speaking children. When asked to identify entities that are “alive,” older Indonesian-speaking children selected both plants and animals, but their English-speaking counterparts tended to exclude plants, which suggests that they may have misaligned “alive” with one of the “animal” senses. This work underscores the ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010
What is the relation between human and nonhuman animals? As adults, we construe this relation fle... more What is the relation between human and nonhuman animals? As adults, we construe this relation flexibly, depending in part on the situation at hand. From a biological perspective, we acknowledge the status of humans as one species among many (as in Western science), but at the same time may adopt other perspectives, including an anthropocentric perspective in which human characteristics are attributed to nonhuman animals (as in fables and popular media). How do these perspectives develop? The predominant view in developmental cognitive science is that young children universally possess only one markedly anthropocentric vantage point, and must undergo fundamental conceptual change, overturning their initially human-centered framework before they can acquire a distinctly biological framework. Evidence from two experiments challenges this view. By developing a task that allows us to test children as young as 3 years of age, we are able to demonstrate that anthropocentrism is not the fir...
Decades of research have documented in school-aged children a persistent difficulty apprehending ... more Decades of research have documented in school-aged children a persistent difficulty apprehending an overarching biological concept that encompasses animate entities like humans and non-human animals, as well as plants. This has led many researchers to conclude that young children have yet to integrate plants and animate entities into a concept LIVING THING. However, virtually all investigations have used the word "alive" to probe children's understanding, an ambiguous term that technically describes all living things, but in practice is often aligned with animate entities only. We show that when "alive" is replaced with less ambiguous probes, children readily demonstrate knowledge of an overarching concept linking plants with humans and non-human animals. This work suggests that children have a burgeoning appreciation this fundamental biological concept, and that the word "alive" paradoxically masks young children's appreciation of the concept to which it is meant to refer.
and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study pu... more and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
We examine two core folk-biological concepts (e.g., animate, living thing, where small capital le... more We examine two core folk-biological concepts (e.g., animate, living thing, where small capital letters denote concepts; quotation marks denote their names; italics denote languagespecific names) in adults and children from the Wichí community, an indigenous group of Amerindians living in the Chaco forest in north Argentina. We provide an overview of the Wichí community, describing in brief their interaction with objects and events in the natural world, and the naming systems they use to describe key folkbiological concepts. We then report the results of two behavioral studies, each designed to deepen our understanding of the acquisition of the fundamental folkbiological concepts animate and living thing in Wichí adults and children. These results converge well with evidence from other communities. Wichí children and adults appreciate these fundamental concepts; both are strongly aligned with the Wichí community-wide belief systems. This work underscores the importance of considering cultural and linguistic factors in studying the acquisition of fundamental concepts about the biological world.
This article considers the semantic structure of the animal category from a cross-cultural develo... more This article considers the semantic structure of the animal category from a cross-cultural developmental perspective. Children and adults from three North American communities (urban majority culture, rural majority culture and rural Native American) were prompted to generate animal names, and the resulting lists were analyzed for their underlying dimensionality and for the typicality or salience of specific animal names. The semantic structure of the animal category appeared to be consistent across cultural groups, but the relative salience of animal kinds varied as a function of culture and first-hand experience with the natural world. These results provide evidence of a shared representation of animals across disparate cultures but also indicate a role for culture in shaping animal concepts.
How do children come to understand the relation between human and nonhuman animals? This relation... more How do children come to understand the relation between human and nonhuman animals? This relation is central to endeavors as diverse as scientific reasoning and spiritual practice. Recent evidence reveals that young children appreciate each of the two concepts – human and non-human animal. Yet it remains unclear whether they also appreciate that humans are indeed part of the animal kingdom. In this study, we adopt a cross-cultural, developmental perspective to examine children’s interpretation of fundamental biological concepts, focusing on children from three distinctly different US communities (urban European Americans; rural European Americans and rural Native Americans (Menominee) living on ancestral tribal lands) that vary in their habitual contact with the natural world and in their cultural perspective on the human-nonhuman animal relation. Using structured interviews, we trace 160 children’s understanding of concepts including ‘human,’ ‘mammal,’ and ‘animal’, and the relatio...
This chapter was originally published in the book The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol ... more This chapter was originally published in the book The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol 50, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author's institution, for noncommercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who know you, and providing a copy to your institution's administrator. All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institution's website or repository, are prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier's permissions site at:
Although attention models assume that the two subproblems of a discrimination shift are treated a... more Although attention models assume that the two subproblems of a discrimination shift are treated as a single problem, learning of a nonreversal shift can be broken down into performance on the subproblem that changes reward conditions and the one that does not, A general analysis of performance on these subproblems, appropriate to a broad range of attention models, is developed in this paper. This analysis leads to a rejection of attention models for some S populations, but shows that attention models may have been rejected prematurely for other populations of Ss.
We investigated the development of an understanding of the concept LIVING THING in 4-to 10-year-o... more We investigated the development of an understanding of the concept LIVING THING in 4-to 10-year-old monolingual children acquiring either English or Indonesian. In English, LIVING THING is comprised of two major constituent categories, ANIMAL and PLANT. However, the word animal has (at least) two senses, and these overlap in their scope. One sense of animal includes both humans and non-human animals; the other sense excludes humans and includes only non-human animals. In Indonesian, the constituents are organized differently: neither this overlapping category structure nor the polysemous use of animal exists. We consider the consequence of this cross-linguistic difference on acquisition, asking whether underlying category structure, coupled with the polysemy of the word animal, interferes with the acquisition of the concept ALIVE or LIVING THING. Using a Sorting Task, we compared English-and Indonesian-speaking children's ability to form a category that includes all and only LIV...
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific ... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. 1
Research in the field of learning sciences demonstrates that various forms of knowledge are creat... more Research in the field of learning sciences demonstrates that various forms of knowledge are created through participation in diverse but often undervalued community practices (Nasir, Rosebery, Warren, & Lee, 2006). However, knowledge created in practice is not traditionally explored in research about complex systems thinking (Duarte Olson, Forthcoming). This session seeks to recognize and capitalize on the wealth of complex systems knowledge learned through everyday practices in informal contexts. We present arguments that are grounded in research taking place in four different communities—with Brazilian samba schools, triathletes, Native Americans, and environmental educators. The goal of the symposium is to discuss (1) how complex systems thinking can be developed through different practices in informal environments, and (2) how an under-representation of diverse samples and phenomena may eschew our understanding of complex systems thinking.
Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per res... more Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing this collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden to Department of Defense, Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports (0704-0188), 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington, VA 22202-4302. Respondents should be aware that notwithstanding any other provision of law, no person shall be subject to any penalty for failing to comply with a collection of information if it does not display a currently valid OMB control number.
I begin by describing (in broad strokes) a collaborative research venture in which my colleagues ... more I begin by describing (in broad strokes) a collaborative research venture in which my colleagues and I have focused on the acquisition of folkbiologic knowledge. We adopt a cross-linguistic, cross-cultural view to ask a) what capacities young children bring to the task of acquisition and b) how the environment (including the objects and events that populate that child's world, the language used to describe them, and the cultural practices invoked to highlight them) shapes the process of acquisition. The work presented here focuses in children's construal of the concept 'alive' or 'living thing'. 1 After describing briefly the populations we have included thus far and our research strategy for identifying the contributions of language and culture in the acquisition of the concept 'alive', I offer evidence from 4-to 10-year-old children from the US, Indonesia, and Mexico. This work reveals important commonalities in early development and also illustrates an intimate connection between culture, language and conceptual organization in the evolution of knowledge. I close with a discussion of the advantages of combining psychological, linguistic and anthropologic methods. in developing theories.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2013
This study reports ethnographic and experimental analyses of inter-generational changes in native... more This study reports ethnographic and experimental analyses of inter-generational changes in native Itza' Maya and immigrant Ladino populations of Guatemala's Petén rainforest concerning understanding of ecological relationships between plants, animals, and humans, and the perceived role of forest spirits in sustaining these relationships. We find dramatic changes in understanding ecological relationships and the perceived role of forest spirits. Itza' Maya conceptions of forest spirits (arux) are now more often confounded with Ladino spirits (duendes), with Itza' spirits no longer reliably serving as forest guardians. These changes correlate with a shift in personal values regarding the forest, away from concern with ecologically central trees and towards monetary incentives. More generally, we describe how economic, demographic, and social changes relate to the loss of a system of beliefs and behaviours that once promoted sustainable agro-forestry practices. These changes coincide with open access to common pool resources. In this study we describe an ongoing research project on how different groups of agro-foresters in the lowland rainforest of Guatemala deal with a resource dilemma involving the forest itself. Using ethnographic and experimental methods we describe inter-generational changes in Itza' Maya and Ladino understandings of ecological relationships between plants, animals, and humans, and the perceived role of forest spirits in sustaining these relationships. While dealing with the conception of environment, this study also contributes to the perennial debate of nature versus culture. The subfield of ecological anthropology or French anthropologie de la nature is mainly interested in understanding the concept of nature as well as people's relation to nature. In recent years, ecological anthropology has been especially concerned theoretically and practically with environment policies, bs_bs_banner
This work focuses on the underlying conceptual structure of children’s category of living things ... more This work focuses on the underlying conceptual structure of children’s category of living things from a cross-cultural, cross-linguistic perspective. School-aged children (n= 129) from three Argentinean communities (rural Wichí-speaking, rural Spanish-speaking, urban Spanish-speaking) were asked to generate the names of living things. Analyses were focused on the typicality, semantic organization, and hierarchical level of the names mentioned. We identified convergences among the names generated by children in all three communities, as well as key differences: the typicality, habitats and hierarchical level of the categories mentioned varied as a function of children’s language and their direct experience with the natural world. These findings provide evidence concerning the role of language, culture and experience in shaping children’s folkbiological concepts.
Children's acquisition of fundamental biological concepts (LIVING THING, ANIMAL, PLANT) is sh... more Children's acquisition of fundamental biological concepts (LIVING THING, ANIMAL, PLANT) is shaped by the way these concepts are named. In English, but not Indonesian, the name “animal” is polysemous: One sense includes all animate objects, and the other excludes humans. Because names highlight object categories, if the same name (“animal”) points to two different, hierarchically related biological concepts, children should have difficulty settling on the scope of that term and its close neighbors (e.g.,“alive”). Experiments with 4- to 9-year-old English- and Indonesian-speaking children revealed that “alive” poses unique interpretive challenges, especially for English-speaking children. When asked to identify entities that are “alive,” older Indonesian-speaking children selected both plants and animals, but their English-speaking counterparts tended to exclude plants, which suggests that they may have misaligned “alive” with one of the “animal” senses. This work underscores the ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010
What is the relation between human and nonhuman animals? As adults, we construe this relation fle... more What is the relation between human and nonhuman animals? As adults, we construe this relation flexibly, depending in part on the situation at hand. From a biological perspective, we acknowledge the status of humans as one species among many (as in Western science), but at the same time may adopt other perspectives, including an anthropocentric perspective in which human characteristics are attributed to nonhuman animals (as in fables and popular media). How do these perspectives develop? The predominant view in developmental cognitive science is that young children universally possess only one markedly anthropocentric vantage point, and must undergo fundamental conceptual change, overturning their initially human-centered framework before they can acquire a distinctly biological framework. Evidence from two experiments challenges this view. By developing a task that allows us to test children as young as 3 years of age, we are able to demonstrate that anthropocentrism is not the fir...
Decades of research have documented in school-aged children a persistent difficulty apprehending ... more Decades of research have documented in school-aged children a persistent difficulty apprehending an overarching biological concept that encompasses animate entities like humans and non-human animals, as well as plants. This has led many researchers to conclude that young children have yet to integrate plants and animate entities into a concept LIVING THING. However, virtually all investigations have used the word "alive" to probe children's understanding, an ambiguous term that technically describes all living things, but in practice is often aligned with animate entities only. We show that when "alive" is replaced with less ambiguous probes, children readily demonstrate knowledge of an overarching concept linking plants with humans and non-human animals. This work suggests that children have a burgeoning appreciation this fundamental biological concept, and that the word "alive" paradoxically masks young children's appreciation of the concept to which it is meant to refer.
and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study pu... more and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
We examine two core folk-biological concepts (e.g., animate, living thing, where small capital le... more We examine two core folk-biological concepts (e.g., animate, living thing, where small capital letters denote concepts; quotation marks denote their names; italics denote languagespecific names) in adults and children from the Wichí community, an indigenous group of Amerindians living in the Chaco forest in north Argentina. We provide an overview of the Wichí community, describing in brief their interaction with objects and events in the natural world, and the naming systems they use to describe key folkbiological concepts. We then report the results of two behavioral studies, each designed to deepen our understanding of the acquisition of the fundamental folkbiological concepts animate and living thing in Wichí adults and children. These results converge well with evidence from other communities. Wichí children and adults appreciate these fundamental concepts; both are strongly aligned with the Wichí community-wide belief systems. This work underscores the importance of considering cultural and linguistic factors in studying the acquisition of fundamental concepts about the biological world.
This article considers the semantic structure of the animal category from a cross-cultural develo... more This article considers the semantic structure of the animal category from a cross-cultural developmental perspective. Children and adults from three North American communities (urban majority culture, rural majority culture and rural Native American) were prompted to generate animal names, and the resulting lists were analyzed for their underlying dimensionality and for the typicality or salience of specific animal names. The semantic structure of the animal category appeared to be consistent across cultural groups, but the relative salience of animal kinds varied as a function of culture and first-hand experience with the natural world. These results provide evidence of a shared representation of animals across disparate cultures but also indicate a role for culture in shaping animal concepts.
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