Children's intuitions about the insides of animate agents

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Previous work with preschoolers has found that they expect familiar biological kinds (e.g., sheep) to have biological-looking insides, and familiar artifacts (e.g., cars) to have mechanical-looking insides (Simons & Keil, 1997). The origins of these 'insides' intuitions are unclear. Children typically have little direct experience with the insides of these entities, particularly biological ones. One intriguing possibility is that these expectations are derived from early-developing intuitions about animate agents. From infancy, humans have the ability to distinguish animate agents from inert objects. For example, 8-month-olds expect that novel objects that both move in a self-propelled manner and have fur should have something inside them, but they have no such expectation about objects with only one of these cues (Setoh, Wu, Baillargeon, & Gelman, 2013). It is unclear what 8-month-olds expect to find inside these animate agents, but they show a violation of expectancy if they are shown the object is empty. Is this early-developing ‘insides’ attribution the basis of naive biological intuitions in later childhood?

We examined whether preschool children (N=92; 62 from preschools in the Newark, NJ area, 30 online) have specifically biological expectations about novel animate agents, or if they only have more general expectations that animate agents should have an internal source of motion. We presented preschoolers with videos of two puppets: a "self-propelled" fur-covered puppet, and a fur-covered puppet that is seen to be moved by a human actor. In addition, we presented preschoolers with images of a familiar artifact (motorcycle) and familiar animal (sheep). For each item, we asked them to choose what they thought was inside each of these entities: nothing, biological insides, or mechanical insides.

We conducted two pre-registered analyses (https://osf.io/pzkxw). First, we coded responses as "empty" or "not empty", and found that preschoolers were less likely to say that a self-propelled fur-covered object was empty (20/92), compared to a fur-covered object that was moved by a human actor (31/92, Chi-sq(1) = 3.998, p = .046. We then removed all 'empty' responses and compared the likelihood of choosing biological versus mechanical insides for the self-propelled versus inert object. There was no detectable difference between items, Chi-sq(1) = .11, p = .74, and a binomial exact test collapsing across item found no preference for biological versus mechanical insides overall (59 "biological" and 74 "mechanical" responses), p = .22. In short, preschoolers showed no specifically biological expectations about novel objects, but they expected them to have insides. However, they were able to accurately match biological insides to familiar animals and mechanical insides to familiar artifacts. For these items, we re-coded responses as "accurate" or "inaccurate" (yielding a score between 0 and 2) and found that, overall, preschoolers were well above chance in their ability to associate mechanical insides with the artifact and biological insides with the animal (M = 1.21, SD = .75), t(91) = 2.64, p = .0096. These results suggest that preschoolers’ biological intuitions are only applied to familiar entities and are not generally applied to all animate agents.

Authors

• Jonathan Kominsky, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Patrick Shafto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Bonawitz, Rutgers University - Newark
  Non-Presenting Author