Development of Conceptual Flexibility in Intuitive Biology: Effects of Environment and Experience

• In Event: The role of experience and beliefs in children’s biological reasoning

Abstract

Living things can be classified by in many ways, such as taxonomic similarity (lions and lynx), or shared ecological habitat (ducks and turtles). The present studies used an open-ended card-sorting task to explore developmental and experiential changes in conceptual flexibility–the ability to switch between taxonomic and ecological construals of living things–as well as two processes underlying conceptual flexibility: salience (i.e., the ease with which relations come to mind outside of contextual influences) and availability (i.e., the presence of relations in one’s mental space) of taxonomic and ecological relations. We also used a triad task to examine the extent to which such salience and availability of taxonomic and ecological relations predicted inductive inferences. Participants were 452 six to ten-year-olds from urban, suburban, and rural communities in New England. Across two studies, taxonomic relations were overwhelmingly more salient than ecological relations, although salience of ecological relations was higher among children from rural environments (Study 1) and those who engaged in unstructured exploration of nature (Study 2). Availability of ecological relations, as well as conceptual flexibility, increased with age, and was higher among children living in more rural environments. Notably, salience, but not availability, of ecological relations predicted ecological inferences. These findings suggest that perceptually-similar taxonomic relations are a salient way to organize intuitive biological knowledge and that environmental richness and relevant experience contribute to the salience and availability of ecological knowledge, and thereby, conceptual flexibility in biological thinking. More generally, they highlight important linkages between domain-specific knowledge and domain-general cognitive abilities. We argue that these results point to an account of conceptual development as the emergence of flexible multidimensional conceptual systems for thinking about domains of experience, as exemplified here in the domain of biology. Finally, our results document the importance of taking children’s background into account in science teaching and learning, by demonstrating that life experiences—what children bring to the science classroom—can impact both domain specific and domain general cognitive processes critical for the development of scientific thought.

Authors

• Nicole Betz, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• John D Coley, Northeastern University
  Non-Presenting Author