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Li Y. Deep causal learning for robotic intelligence. Front Neurorobot 2023; 17:1128591. [PMID: 36910267 PMCID: PMC9992986 DOI: 10.3389/fnbot.2023.1128591] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/20/2022] [Accepted: 01/30/2023] [Indexed: 02/24/2023] Open
Abstract
This invited Review discusses causal learning in the context of robotic intelligence. The Review introduces the psychological findings on causal learning in human cognition, as well as the traditional statistical solutions for causal discovery and causal inference. Additionally, we examine recent deep causal learning algorithms, with a focus on their architectures and the benefits of using deep nets, and discuss the gap between deep causal learning and the needs of robotic intelligence.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yangming Li
- RoCAL, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, United States
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2
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Child-directed speech is optimized for syntax-free semantic inference. Sci Rep 2021; 11:16527. [PMID: 34400656 PMCID: PMC8368066 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-95392-x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/04/2021] [Accepted: 07/22/2021] [Indexed: 02/07/2023] Open
Abstract
The way infants learn language is a highly complex adaptive behavior. This behavior chiefly relies on the ability to extract information from the speech they hear and combine it with information from the external environment. Most theories assume that this ability critically hinges on the recognition of at least some syntactic structure. Here, we show that child-directed speech allows for semantic inference without relying on explicit structural information. We simulate the process of semantic inference with machine learning applied to large text collections of two different types of speech, child-directed speech versus adult-directed speech. Taking the core meaning of causality as a test case, we find that in child-directed speech causal meaning can be successfully inferred from simple co-occurrences of neighboring words. By contrast, semantic inference in adult-directed speech fundamentally requires additional access to syntactic structure. These results suggest that child-directed speech is ideally shaped for a learner who has not yet mastered syntactic structure.
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3
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Neufeld E. Against Teleological Essentialism. Cogn Sci 2021; 45:e12961. [PMID: 33873241 DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12961] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/05/2020] [Revised: 02/15/2021] [Accepted: 02/16/2021] [Indexed: 11/29/2022]
Abstract
In two recent papers, Rose and Nichols present evidence in favor of the view that humans represent category essences in terms of a telos, such as honey-making, and not in terms of scientific essences, such as bee DNA. Here, I challenge their interpretation of the evidence and show that it is directly predicted by the main theory they seek to undermine. I argue that their results can be explained as instances of diagnostic reasoning about scientific essences.
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Affiliation(s)
- Eleonore Neufeld
- Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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4
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Girgis H, Nguyen SP. Grown or made? Children’s determination of the origins of natural versus processed foods. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 2020. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2020.100887] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
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5
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Taborda-Osorio H, Cheries EW. Infants' agent individuation: It's what's on the insides that counts. Cognition 2018; 175:11-19. [PMID: 29454257 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.01.016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 12] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/06/2015] [Revised: 01/28/2018] [Accepted: 01/31/2018] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
Adults and preschool-aged children believe that internal properties are more important than external properties when determining an agent's identity over time. The current study examined the developmental origins of this understanding using a manual-search individuation task with 13-month-old infants. Subjects observed semi-transparent objects that looked and behaved like animate agents placed into box that they could reach but not see into. Across trials infants observed objects with either the same- or different-colored insides placed into the box. We found that infants used internal property differences more than external property differences to determine how many agents were involved in the event. A second experiment confirmed that this effect was specific to the domain of animate entities. These results suggest that infants are biased to see an agent's 'insides' as more important for determining its identity over time than its outside properties.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hernando Taborda-Osorio
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Tobin Hall, 135 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
| | - Erik W Cheries
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Tobin Hall, 135 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003, USA.
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6
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Developmental Origins of Biological Explanations: The case of infants’ internal property bias. Psychon Bull Rev 2017; 24:1527-1537. [DOI: 10.3758/s13423-017-1350-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
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7
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Understanding Adolescents' Categorisation of Animal Species. Animals (Basel) 2017; 7:ani7090065. [PMID: 28867794 PMCID: PMC5615296 DOI: 10.3390/ani7090065] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/03/2017] [Revised: 08/16/2017] [Accepted: 08/28/2017] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
Simple Summary When people try to make sense of the world they often use categorisations, which are seen as a basic function of human cognition. People use specific attributes to categorise animals with young children using mostly visual cues like number of legs, whereas adults use more comprehensive attributes such as the habitat that the animal lives in. The aim of the present study was to investigate how adolescents categorise different types of animals. A card sorting exercise in combination with a survey questionnaire was implemented. Adolescents were asked to group images of a variety of common British farm, pet, and wild animals that were printed on cards. Furthermore, adolescents were asked to rate a number of animals regarding their utility, likability, and fear, which served as affective responses. Results show that adolescents primarily use an animal’s perceived utility as a means for their categorisation along with their affective feelings towards those animals. In other words, adolescents group animals into farm, pet, and wild animals with one exception, birds. Birds, regardless of their role in society (pet, farm, or wild animal), were mostly grouped together. The results are important to understand adolescents’ perception of animals, which may explain the different attitudes and behaviours towards animals. Abstract Categorisations are a means of investigating cognitive maps. The present study, for the first time, investigates adolescents’ spontaneous categorisation of 34 animal species. Furthermore, explicit evaluations of 16 selected animals in terms of their perceived utility and likeability were analysed. 105 British adolescents, 54% female, mean age 14.5 (SD = 1.6) participated in the study. Results of multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques indicate 3-dimensional data representation regardless of gender or age. Property fittings show that affect and perceived utility of animals explain two of the MDS dimensions, and hence partly explain adolescents’ categorisation. Additionally, hierarchical cluster analyses show a differentiation between farm animals, birds, pet animals, and wild animals possibly explaining MDS dimension 3. The results suggest that utility perceptions predominantly underlie adolescents’ categorisations and become even more dominant in older adolescents, which potentially has an influence on attitudes to animals with implications for animal welfare, conservation, and education.
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8
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Ahl RE, Keil FC. Diverse Effects, Complex Causes: Children Use Information About Machines' Functional Diversity to Infer Internal Complexity. Child Dev 2016; 88:828-845. [DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12613] [Citation(s) in RCA: 15] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/26/2022]
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9
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Booth AE. Conceptually coherent categories support label-based inductive generalization in preschoolers. J Exp Child Psychol 2014; 123:1-14. [PMID: 24632505 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2014.01.007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/04/2013] [Revised: 01/12/2014] [Accepted: 01/13/2014] [Indexed: 11/28/2022]
Abstract
Why do words support inductive generalization in preschoolers? The current study provides evidence that they do so, at least in part, by working with conceptual knowledge to establish kind membership. A sample of 30 4-year-olds learned new labels for novel items, sometimes along with additional non-obvious information, and were then asked to generalize a novel object property to a target item based on either visual similarity or shared label. Children were more likely to generalize properties based on shared labels (over perceptual similarity) if they initially learned causally coherent properties of items referenced by those labels than if they initially learned non-causal properties of those items or learned no properties at all. This finding suggests that novel words best support inductive inference when they are known by children to reference conceptually coherent categories. Therefore, conceptual information permeates the process of inductive inference in young children. Results are discussed with respect to their implications for the "word-as-feature" and "knowledge-based" accounts of early inductive inference.
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Affiliation(s)
- Amy E Booth
- Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
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10
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Bright AK, Feeney A. Causal knowledge and the development of inductive reasoning. J Exp Child Psychol 2014; 122:48-61. [PMID: 24518051 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2013.11.015] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/05/2013] [Revised: 11/27/2013] [Accepted: 11/27/2013] [Indexed: 12/01/2022]
Abstract
We explored the development of sensitivity to causal relations in children's inductive reasoning. Children (5-, 8-, and 12-year-olds) and adults were given trials in which they decided whether a property known to be possessed by members of one category was also possessed by members of (a) a taxonomically related category or (b) a causally related category. The direction of the causal link was either predictive (prey→predator) or diagnostic (predator→prey), and the property that participants reasoned about established either a taxonomic or causal context. There was a causal asymmetry effect across all age groups, with more causal choices when the causal link was predictive than when it was diagnostic. Furthermore, context-sensitive causal reasoning showed a curvilinear development, with causal choices being most frequent for 8-year-olds regardless of context. Causal inductions decreased thereafter because 12-year-olds and adults made more taxonomic choices when reasoning in the taxonomic context. These findings suggest that simple causal relations may often be the default knowledge structure in young children's inductive reasoning, that sensitivity to causal direction is present early on, and that children over-generalize their causal knowledge when reasoning.
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Affiliation(s)
- Aimée K Bright
- Psychology Division, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK.
| | - Aidan Feeney
- School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK
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11
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Butler LP, Markman EM. Preschoolers use pedagogical cues to guide radical reorganization of category knowledge. Cognition 2014; 130:116-27. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.10.002] [Citation(s) in RCA: 33] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/17/2012] [Revised: 08/15/2013] [Accepted: 10/09/2013] [Indexed: 10/26/2022]
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12
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Kloos H, Sloutsky VM. Blocking a redundant cue: what does it say about preschoolers' causal competence? Dev Sci 2013; 16:713-27. [PMID: 24033577 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12047] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/27/2011] [Accepted: 12/29/2012] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
The current study investigates the degree to which preschoolers can engage in causal inferences in a blocking paradigm, a paradigm in which a cue is consistently linked with a target, either alone (A-T) or paired with another cue (AB-T). Unlike previous blocking studies with preschoolers, we manipulated the causal structure of the events without changing the specific contingencies. In particular, cues were said to be either potential causes (prediction condition), or they were said to be potential effects (diagnosis condition). The causally appropriate inference is to block the redundant cue B when it is a potential cause of the target, but not when it is a potential effect. Findings show a stark difference in performance between preschoolers and adults: While adults blocked the redundant cue only in the prediction condition, children blocked the redundant cue indiscriminately across both conditions. Therefore, children, but not adults, ignored the causal structure of the events. These findings challenge a developmental account that attributes sophisticated machinery of causal reasoning to young children.
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Affiliation(s)
- Heidi Kloos
- Department of Psychology, University of Cincinnati, USA
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13
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14
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15
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Cimpian A, Markman EM. The generic/nongeneric distinction influences how children interpret new information about social others. Child Dev 2011; 82:471-92. [PMID: 21410911 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01525.x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 63] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
These studies investigate how the distinction between generic sentences (e.g., "Boys are good at math") and nongeneric sentences (e.g., "Johnny is good at math") shapes children's social cognition. These sentence types are hypothesized to have different implications about the source and nature of the properties conveyed. Specifically, generics may be more likely to imply that the referred-to properties emerge naturally from an internal source, which may cause these properties to become essentialized. Four experiments (N = 269 four-year-olds and undergraduates) confirmed this hypothesis but also suggested that participants only essentialize the information provided in generic form when this construal is consistent with their prior theoretical knowledge. These studies further current understanding of language as a means of learning about others.
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Affiliation(s)
- Andrei Cimpian
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Stanford University, Champaign, IL, USA.
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16
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del Río MF, Strasser K. Chilean children's essentialist reasoning about poverty. BRITISH JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 2010; 29:722-43. [PMID: 21199501 DOI: 10.1348/2044-835x.002005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 14] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/12/2022]
Abstract
Two studies are reported that examine the hypothesis that children construct representations of poverty based on a theory of causal essentialism. One hundred and twenty Chilean kindergartners, half from low socio-economic status (SES) schools and the other half from high-SES schools, participated in the study. The results showed children's tendency towards an essentialist reasoning about poverty. All children in the study privileged internal features over external ones when deciding who is poor, and also used wealth category as a preferred clue to make inferences about people's attributes. However, only high-SES children's answers were consistent with the belief that poverty is inherited and resistant to growth. Implications of these findings for theory and practice, as well as remaining questions, are addressed.
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17
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Sobel DM, Tenenbaum JB, Gopnik A. Children's causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers. Cogn Sci 2010. [DOI: 10.1207/s15516709cog2803_1] [Citation(s) in RCA: 29] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/31/2022]
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18
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Causal-Based Categorization. PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING AND MOTIVATION 2010. [DOI: 10.1016/s0079-7421(10)52002-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register]
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19
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Information learned from generic language becomes central to children’s biological concepts: Evidence from their open-ended explanations. Cognition 2009; 113:14-25. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.07.004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 90] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/25/2008] [Revised: 07/02/2009] [Accepted: 07/09/2009] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
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Abstract
Much of children's knowledge is derived not from their direct experiences with the environment but rather from the input of others. However, until recently, the focus in studies of concept development was primarily on children's knowledge, with relatively little attention paid to the nature of the input. The past 10 years have seen an important shift in focus. This article reviews this approach, by examining the nature of the input and the nature of the learner, to shed light on early conceptual learning. These findings argue against the simple notion that conceptual development is either supplied by the environment or innately specified, and instead demonstrate how the two work together. The implications for how children reconcile competing belief systems are also discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Susan A Gelman
- Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1109, USA.
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22
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Meunier B, Cordier F. The role of feature type and causal status in 4–5-year-old children's biological categorizations. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 2009. [DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2008.05.003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/21/2022]
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23
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Affiliation(s)
- Frank C Keil
- Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8205, USA.
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24
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Schulz LE, Gopnik A, Glymour C. Preschool children learn about causal structure from conditional interventions. Dev Sci 2007; 10:322-32. [PMID: 17444973 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00587.x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 90] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/23/2022]
Abstract
The conditional intervention principle is a formal principle that relates patterns of interventions and outcomes to causal structure. It is a central assumption of experimental design and the causal Bayes net formalism. Two studies suggest that preschoolers can use the conditional intervention principle to distinguish causal chains, common cause and interactive causal structures even in the absence of differential spatiotemporal cues and specific mechanism knowledge. Children were also able to use knowledge of causal structure to predict the patterns of evidence that would result from interventions. A third study suggests that children's spontaneous play can generate evidence that would support such accurate causal learning.
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Affiliation(s)
- Laura E Schulz
- Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
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25
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Opfer JE, Bulloch MJ. Causal relations drive young children’s induction, naming, and categorization. Cognition 2007; 105:206-17. [PMID: 17045580 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2006.08.006] [Citation(s) in RCA: 31] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/07/2006] [Revised: 08/24/2006] [Accepted: 08/24/2006] [Indexed: 10/24/2022]
Abstract
A number of recent models and experiments have suggested that evidence of early category-based induction is an artifact of perceptual cues provided by experimenters. We tested these accounts against the prediction that different relations (causal versus non-causal) determine the types of perceptual similarity by which children generalize. Young children were asked to label, to infer novel properties, and to project future appearances of a novel animal that varied in two opposite respects: (1) how much it looked like another animal whose name and properties were known, and (2) how much its parents looked like parents of another animal whose name and properties were known. When exemplar origins were known, children generalized to exemplars with similar origins rather than with similar appearances; when origins were unknown, children generalized to exemplars with similar appearances. Results indicate even young children possess the cognitive control to choose the similarities that best predict accurate generalizations.
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Affiliation(s)
- John E Opfer
- Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
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26
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Sheya A, Smith LB. Perceptual Features and the Development of Conceptual Knowledge. JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT 2006. [DOI: 10.1207/s15327647jcd0704_2] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/31/2022]
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27
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Abstract
Three studies investigated children's belief in causal determinism. If children are determinists, they should infer unobserved causes whenever observed causes appear to act stochastically. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds saw a stochastic generative cause and inferred the existence of an unobserved inhibitory cause. Children traded off inferences about the presence of unobserved inhibitory causes and the absence of unobserved generative causes. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds used the pattern of indeterminacy to decide whether unobserved variables were generative or inhibitory. Experiment 3 suggested that children (4 years old) resist believing that direct causes can act stochastically, although they accept that events can be stochastically associated. Children's deterministic assumptions seem to support inferences not obtainable from other cues.
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Affiliation(s)
- Laura E Schulz
- Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA.
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28
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Knowledge, Development, and Category Learning. PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING AND MOTIVATION 2006. [DOI: 10.1016/s0079-7421(06)46002-3] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register]
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29
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Gopnik A, Glymour C, Sobel DM, Schulz LE, Kushnir T, Danks D. A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets. Psychol Rev 2004; 111:3-32. [PMID: 14756583 DOI: 10.1037/0033-295x.111.1.3] [Citation(s) in RCA: 392] [Impact Index Per Article: 19.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
The authors outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. They propose that children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate "causal map" of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or Bayes nets. Children's causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2- to 4-year-old children construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism.
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Affiliation(s)
- Alison Gopnik
- Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
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30
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Sloutsky VM, Fisher AV. Induction and Categorization in Young Children: A Similarity-Based Model. ACTA ACUST UNITED AC 2004; 133:166-88. [PMID: 15149249 DOI: 10.1037/0096-3445.133.2.166] [Citation(s) in RCA: 193] [Impact Index Per Article: 9.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
The authors present a similarity-based model of induction and categorization in young children (SINC). The model suggests that (a). linguistic labels contribute to the perceived similarity of compared entities and (b). categorization and induction are a function of similarity computed over perceptual information and linguistic labels. The model also predicts young children's similarity judgment, induction, and categorization performance under different stimuli and task conditions. Predictions of the model were tested and confirmed in 6 experiments, in which 4- to 5-year-olds performed similarity judgment, induction, and categorization tasks using artificial and real labels (Experiments 1-4) and recognition memory tasks (Experiments 5A and 5B). Results corroborate the similarity-based account of young children's induction and categorization, and they support both qualitative and quantitative predictions of the model.
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Affiliation(s)
- Vladimir M Sloutsky
- Center for Cognitive Science, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
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31
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Abstract
The rise of appeals to intuitive theories in many areas of cognitive science must cope with a powerful fact. People understand the workings of the world around them in far less detail than they think. This illusion of knowledge depth has been uncovered in a series of recent studies and is caused by several distinctive properties of explanatory understanding not found in other forms of knowledge. Other experimental work has shown that people do have skeletal frameworks of expectations that constrain richer ad hoc theory construction on the fly. These frameworks are supplemented by an ability to evaluate and rely on the division of cognitive labour in one's culture, an ability shown to be present even in young children.
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32
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McClelland JL, Rogers TT. The parallel distributed processing approach to semantic cognition. Nat Rev Neurosci 2003; 4:310-22. [PMID: 12671647 DOI: 10.1038/nrn1076] [Citation(s) in RCA: 300] [Impact Index Per Article: 14.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/09/2022]
Affiliation(s)
- James L McClelland
- Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 4400 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213-2683, USA.
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