3-154 - Young Children's Inferences About Artifacts and Their Origins

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun... I take culture to be those webs.” (Geertz, 1973)

To master the social world, children must navigate the many complexities of human culture. Artifacts, like tools, clothes, and art, are one common manifestation of culture. However, understanding artifacts involves making a dizzying number of inferences—about acceptability, origins, authenticity, value, function, and ownership. What kinds of inferences do young children make about artifacts, and on what basis? This symposium includes four papers which each examine the development of a different aspect of artifact cognition.

Paper 1 investigates how preschoolers reason about the acceptability of using artifacts by examining their explanations, and finds how children use ownership to reason about the acceptability of using an artifact changes with age. Paper 2 investigates how 5- and 6-year-olds judge whether artifacts persist through physical changes, and reveals that the expressions used to speak about artifacts influences how children reason about their persistence. Using auditory artifacts (e.g., music), paper 3 examines if infants understand artifacts as the product of animate agents’ intentional action, and shows that 1-year-olds can spontaneously infer whether sounds are caused by animate agents. Paper 4 investigates the special value children place on certain artifacts, and finds that from age 3-6 children increasingly attend to artifact history when judging the special value of artifacts. Overall, this symposium provides valuable insight into the development and cognitive mechanisms underlying reasoning about artifacts, a common aspect of human culture.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Shaylene E. Nancekivell, University of Waterloo

Individual Presentations

• Preschoolers use Ownership to Explain the Acceptability of Using Artifacts - Presenting Author: Shaylene E. Nancekivell, University of Waterloo; Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo

• The Link Between Speaking About Artifacts and Reasoning About Their Persistence: Evidence From Children and Adults - Presenting Author: Kristan Marchak, University of British Columbia; D. Geoffrey Hall, Univ of British Columbia

• Music as Auditory Artifact: Were Those Notes Caused by an Agent, or an Inanimate Force? - Presenting Author: Adena Schachner, Boston University; Deb Kelemen, Boston Univ

• Children's Concepts of Authentic Objects as Revealed Through Parent-Child Conversations - Presenting Author: Susan A Gelman, Univ of Michigan; Sarah Stilwell, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Brandy N Frazier, Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa; Christina Koch Burkhardt, University of Virginia; Natalie S Davidson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor