We're going to the zoo:Interactive educational activities with animals boost category-based induction in children

Abstract

We investigated whether category-based induction can be enhanced through educational activities with real-life animals. Four induction tasks involving pictures of real and novel biological kinds were administered to 252 children aged 5- to 7- years, split across two testing sessions. Between these two testing sessions, 129 of these children took part in a zoo-based educational activity where their attention was directed towards the importance of non-obvious category features. In the first testing session, older children made significantly more category inferences, consistent with developmental accounts of category-based induction. In the second testing session, there was a greater increase in category-based induction decisions made by children in the training condition. We suggest that category-based induction could be driven by an accumulation of category knowledge which leads to a deeper understanding of the importance of category features.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2018.10.003
Divisions: College of Health & Life Sciences
College of Health & Life Sciences > School of Psychology
College of Health & Life Sciences > Clinical and Systems Neuroscience
College of Health & Life Sciences > School of Optometry > Vision, Hearing and Language
Funding Information: The research took place at Aston University and was funded by an Economic and Social Research Council Studentship , and a Twycross Zoo Conservation Fund , awarded to the first author. We would like to thank the Education Team at Twycross Zoo and the staff
Additional Information: © 2018, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Uncontrolled Keywords: Category,Child development,Education,Induction,Training,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology,Developmental and Educational Psychology
Publication ISSN: 1879-226X
Last Modified: 05 Feb 2024 08:32
Date Deposited: 26 Nov 2018 11:25
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://www.sci ... 2459?via%3Dihub (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2019-01-01
Published Online Date: 2018-11-13
Accepted Date: 2018-10-29
Authors: Badger, Julia R.
Shapiro, Laura R. (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-3276-457X)

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