Three experiments addressed the relative importance of original function and current function in artifact categorization. Subjects were asked to judge whether an artifact that was made for one purpose (e.g. making tea) and was currently being used for another purpose (e.g. watering flowers) was a teapot or a watering can. Experiment 1 replicated the finding by Hall (1995) (unpublished manuscript) that adults rely on the original function of an artifact over a current function in their kind judgments. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that whereas the kind judgments of 6-year-olds, like those of adults, patterned with the original function, those of 4-year-olds did not. Four-year-olds were influenced by the order in which the functions were mentioned in the story. Further, in their justifications 6-year-olds and adults referred to the origin of the objects, whereas 4-year-olds virtually never did. We conclude that 6-year-olds have begun to organize their understanding of artifacts around the notion of original function, and that 4-year-olds have not. The data are discussed as they bear on children's understanding of the design stance (Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge,

A familiar adage in the philosophy of science is that general hypotheses are better supported by varied evidence than by uniform evidence. Several studies suggest that young children do not respect this principle, and thus su#er from a defect in their inductive methodology. We argue that the diversity principle does not have the normative status that psychologists attribute to it, and should be replaced by a simple rule of probability. We then report experiments designed to detect conformity to the latter rule in children's inductive judgment.

Previous work suggests that preschoolers understand that members of some social groups (e.g., based on occupation or gender) speak in distinct ways, but do not understand that members of other social groups (e.g., based on race, culture, or nationality) speak different languages. In these four studies we explored preschool children’s inferences about language and social group membership. In Study 1 we found that preschoolers believed that minority race individuals, people wearing unf~ili ~ clothing, or people living in unfa-miliar dwellings were more likely to speak an unfamiliar foreign language than to speak English. Studies 2A and 2B showed that children do not map social group differences to language for all social categories. Specifically, children were more likely to attribute language differences to racial rather than age differences and were more likely to map differences in music prefer-ence onto age than racial differences. Results of Study 3 showed children’s inferences about language and social group differences were not derived from differences in intelligibility. Study 4 provides insight into why children readily make these language to social kind mappings by identifying a com-mon property that both broad social kinds and distinct languages are thought to share. Together these studies provide evidence that even preschoolers may

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Abstract: Strong adaptationists explore complex organic design as task-specific adaptations to ancestral environments. This strategy seems best when there is evidence of homology. Weak adaptationists don’t assume that complex organic (including cognitive and linguistic) functioning necessarily or primarily represents task-specific adaptation. This approach to cognition resembles physicists ’ attempts to deductively explain the most facts with fewest hypotheses. For certain domain-specific competencies (folkbiology) strong adaptationism is useful but not necessary to research. With group-level belief systems (religion) strong adaptationism degenerates into spurious notions of social function and cultural selection. In other cases (language, especially universal grammar) weak adaptationism’s ‘minimalist ’ approach seems productive. 1.

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A familiar adage in the philosophy of science is that general hypotheses are better supported by varied evidence than by uniform evidence. Several studies suggest that young children do not respect this principle, and thus su#er from a defect in their inductive methodology. We argue that the diversity principle does not have the normative status that psychologists attribute to it, and should be replaced by a simple rule of probability. We then report an experiment designed to detect conformity to the latter rule in children's inductive judgment. Evidential Diversity 1 Introduction A central issue in cognitive development is whether children's scientific reasoning is methodologically sound (simply short on facts), or else neglectful of fundamental principles of inductive reasoning (Carey, 1985; Markman, 1989; Keil, 1989; Kuhn, 1996; Gopnik and Meltzo#, 1996; Koslowski, 1996). To address the issue, normative standards of inductive reasoning must be formulated, and children's thinking e...

This report considers differences in induction of biological properties between children and preadolescents based on differences in stimuli processing in these two groups. Two studies test predictions that young children, but not preadolescents, base their inductive inference on aggregating information from different sources rather than relying on a single source of information. In both experiments 4-5 year-olds, 7-8 year-olds, and 10-11 year-olds were presented with an inductive task. In Experiment 1, linguistic labels were fully crossed with relationship information, whereas in Experiment 2 perceptual similarity information was fully crossed with relationship and labeling information. While 10-11 year-olds relied exclusively on inheritance across experiments, 4-5 year-olds relied on an aggregate of multiple sources of information, and 7-8 year-olds fell between these two extremes. In addition, while the relative weight of inheritance on inferences increased with age, the weights of other information sources decreased. These results support the hypotheses suggesting that between 8 and 10 years of age children undergo a developmental shift from a holistic featureintegration induction to knowledge-based induction based on a single most predictive source.

Vigilance towards deception is investigated in 3- to-5-year-old children: (i) In study 1, children as young as 3 years of age prefer the testimony of a benevolent rather than of a malevolent communicator. (ii) In study 2, only at the age of four do children show understanding of the falsity of a lie uttered by a communicator described as a liar. (iii) In study 3, the ability to recognize a lie when the communicator is described as intending to deceive the child emerges around four and improves throughout the fifth and sixth year of life. On the basis of this evidence, we suggest that preference for the testimony of a benevolent communicator, understanding of the epistemic aspects of deception, and understanding of its intentional aspects are three functionally and developmentally distinct components of epistemic vigilance. Children‘s vigilance towards deception

Contemporary research on racial categorization is mostly encompassed by two research traditions—social constructionism and the cognitive-cum-evolutionary approach. Although both literatures have some plausible empirical evidence and some theoretical insights to contribute to a full understanding of racial categorization, there has been little contact between their proponents. In order to foster such contacts, we critically review both traditions, focusing particularly on the recent evolutionary/cognitive explanations of racial categorization. On the basis of this critical survey, we put forward a list of eleven requirements that a satisfactory theory of racial categorization should satisfy. We conclude that despite some decisive progress, we are still far from having a complete theory of why humans classify people on the basis of skin color, body appearance or hair style. Key Words Racial categorization, racialism, social constructionism, cultural variation, cultural niches of concepts, evolutionary psychology, folk sociology, human kind module, coalitional module, ethnic cognition, ethnies, folk biology, psychological essentialism, cultural transmission. 1.