Unmasking “Alive”: Children's Appreciation of a Concept Linking All Living Things

Abstract

Decades of research have documented in school-aged children a persistent difficulty apprehending an overarching biological concept that encompasses animate entities such as humans and nonhuman animals, as well as plants. This has led many researchers to conclude that young children have yet to integrate plants and animate entities into a concept of LIVING THING. However, virtually all investigations have used the word “alive” to probe children's understanding, a term that technically describes all living things, but in practice is often aligned with animate entities only. We show that when alive is replaced with less ambiguous probes, children readily demonstrate knowledge of an overarching concept linking plants with humans and nonhuman animals. This work suggests that children have a burgeoning appreciation of this fundamental biological concept, and that the word alive paradoxically masks young children's appreciation of the concept to which it is meant to refer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes for Health (R01 HD41653) and the National Science Foundation (BCS 0132469) to the second and third authors.

The authors wish to express their gratitude to Flo Anggoro, Andrzej Tarlowski, Sara Unsworth, Patricia Hermann, Jessica Umphress, Melissa Luna, Will Bennis, and Olivier LeGuen for discussion of this work, and especially to Jennifer Woodring for contributions every step along the way. We also thank the principal, teachers, and students at Walt Disney Magnet School.

Notes

¹Preliminary analyses of both Experiments 1 and 2 revealed no differences within animates, within plants, or within nonliving things, and therefore we collapsed across these to test our hypotheses.

Note. These entities correspond to the entities used in previous research (Anggoro, 2005; Anggoro, Waxman, & Medin, 2008). They were selected to represent a variety of life forms. For example, in addition to the human there are three mammals, four nonmammals (selected again for their variety: a bird, a fish, an insect, an invertebrate) three diverse plants, and four nonliving natural kinds, as well as three artifacts.