title: Preschoolers use pedagogical cues to guide radical reorganization of category knowledge.
abstract: In constructing a conceptual understanding of the world, children must actively evaluate what information is idiosyncratic or superficial, and what represents essential, defining information about kinds and categories. Preschoolers observed identical evidence about a novel object's function (magnetism) produced in subtly different manners: accidentally, intentionally, or demonstrated communicatively and pedagogically. Only when evidence was explicitly demonstrated for their benefit did children reliably go beyond salient perceptual features (color or shape), to infer function to be a defining property on which to base judgments about category membership. Children did not show this pattern when reasoning about a novel perceptual property, suggesting that a pedagogical communicative context may be especially important for children's learning about artifact functions. Observing functional evidence in a pedagogical context helps children construct fundamentally different conceptions of novel categories as defined not by superficial appearances but by deeper, functional properties.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, United States. Electronic address: lucas_butler@eva.mpg.de.
authors.forename: Lucas P
authors.initials: LP
authors.lastname: Butler
authors.forename: Ellen M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Markman
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D011897:Random Allocation; D012938:Social Perception
keywords: Categorization; Conceptual development; Pedagogy; Social cognition; Social learning