Young children’s learning and generalization of teleological and mechanistic explanations

ABSTRACT

Young children often endorse explanations of the natural world that appeal to functions or purpose—for example, that rocks are pointy so animals can scratch on them. By contrast, most Western-educated adults reject such explanations. What accounts for this change? We investigated 4- to 5-year-old children’s ability to generalize the form of an explanation from examples by presenting them with novel teleological explanations, novel mechanistic explanations, or no explanations for 5 nonliving natural objects. We then asked children to explain novel instances of the same objects and novel kinds of objects. We found that children were able to learn and generalize explanations of both types, suggesting an ability to draw generalizations over the form of an explanation. We also found that teleological and mechanistic explanations were learned and generalized equally well, suggesting that if a domain-general teleological bias exists, it does not manifest as a bias in learning or generalization.

Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the Concepts and Cognition Lab and the Gopnik Lab at University of California, Berkeley, for helpful feedback and support, and we thank Si Wang for help with preliminary coding. The reported experiment was completed in partial fulfillment of the undergraduate thesis requirements for N. Brooke.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ Other results from this analysis were a nonsignificant effect of test type, F(1, 57) = 0.623, p = .433, and a nonsignificant interaction, F(2, 57) = 0.324, p = .725.

² It is worth noting that mechanistic responses were more common in the transfer test than in the learning test. We expect that this finding reflects idiosyncratic properties of our stimulus materials, but it is also possible that participating in the learning test itself induced children to respond more mechanistically or that the shift from Planet Bizorm to Earth had some impact.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially funded by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0819231 to T. Lombrozo and a Jacobs Foundation Fellowship to L. Bonawitz [2016 121702]. N. Scalise is currently supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship [DGE 1322106].