Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Dev Sci. 2011 Jan;14(1):1-8. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00949.x.
Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were asked to make judgments about the reality status of four different types of machines: real machines that children and adults interact with on a daily basis, real machines that children and adults interact with rarely (if at all), and impossible machines that violated a real-world physical or biological causal law. Adults generally categorized all of the machines accurately. Both groups of children categorized familiar possible machines as real, but were agnostic as to the fantasy status of unfamiliar possible machines. Children generally responded that both kinds of impossible machines were make-believe, but 4-year-olds were more likely to make these accurate judgments for the physical than biological items, different from the older children and adults (whose responses were similar). These data suggest that children's judgments about the possibility of machines are not strictly limited by first-hand experience. Young children's domain-specific causal knowledge interacts with their understanding of the fantasy/reality distinction to constrain their inferences in a rational way.
研究者分别让 4 岁、6 岁和成年人判断 4 种不同类型机器的现实状态：儿童和成人日常互动的真实机器、儿童和成人很少（如果有的话）互动的真实机器、以及违反现实世界物理或生物因果规律的不可能机器。成年人通常能准确地对所有机器进行分类。两组儿童都将熟悉的可能机器归类为真实，但对不熟悉的可能机器的幻想状态持不可知态度。儿童通常认为两种不可能机器都是虚构的，但 4 岁儿童比大一点的儿童和成年人更有可能对物理物品做出这种准确判断，而不是对生物物品（他们的反应相似）。这些数据表明，儿童对机器可能性的判断并不严格局限于第一手经验。幼儿特定领域的因果知识与他们对幻想/现实区别的理解相互作用，以合理的方式限制他们的推理。
