Bascandziev Igor, Tardiff Nathan, Zaitchik Deborah, Carey Susan
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States; Department of Psychology, Reed College, Portland, OR, United States.
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
Cogn Psychol. 2018 Aug;104:1-28. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2018.03.002. Epub 2018 Mar 26.
Some episodes of learning are easier than others. Preschoolers can learn certain facts, such as "my grandmother gave me this purse," only after one or two exposures (easy to learn; fast mapping), but they require several years to learn that plants are alive or that the sun is not alive (hard to learn). One difference between the two kinds of knowledge acquisition is that hard cases often require conceptual construction, such as the construction of the biological concept alive, whereas easy cases merely involve forming new beliefs formulated over concepts the child already has (belief revision, a form of knowledge enrichment). We asked whether different domain-general cognitive resources support these two types of knowledge acquisition (conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment that supports fast mapping) by testing 82 6-year-olds in a pre-training/training/post-training study. We measured children's improvement in an episode involving theory construction (the beginning steps of acquisition of the framework theory of vitalist biology, which requires conceptual change) and in an episode involving knowledge enrichment alone (acquisition of little known facts about animals, such as the location of crickets' ears and the color of octopus blood). In addition, we measured children's executive functions and receptive vocabulary to directly compare the resources drawn upon in the two episodes of learning. We replicated and extended previous findings highlighting the differences between conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment, and we found that Executive Functions predict improvement on the Vitalism battery but not on the Fun Facts battery and that Receptive Vocabulary predicts improvement the Fun Facts battery but not on the Vitalism battery. This double dissociation provides new evidence for the distinction between the two types of knowledge acquisition, and bears on the nature of the learning mechanisms involved in each.
有些学习过程比其他的更容易。学龄前儿童只有在接触一两次之后（易于学习；快速映射），才能学会某些事实，比如“我的祖母给了我这个钱包”，但他们需要几年时间才能明白植物是有生命的，或者太阳是没有生命的（难以学习）。这两种知识获取方式的一个区别在于，困难的情况往往需要概念构建，比如构建“有生命”这个生物学概念，而简单的情况仅仅涉及在孩子已有的概念基础上形成新的信念（信念修正，一种知识丰富的形式）。我们通过在一项预训练/训练/后训练研究中测试82名6岁儿童，来探究不同的领域通用认知资源是否支持这两种知识获取方式（概念构建和支持快速映射的知识丰富）。我们测量了儿童在一个涉及理论构建的过程（获取活力论生物学框架理论的初始步骤，这需要概念改变）和一个仅涉及知识丰富的过程（获取关于动物的鲜为人知的事实，比如蟋蟀耳朵的位置和章鱼血液的颜色）中的进步。此外，我们测量了儿童的执行功能和接受性词汇量，以直接比较这两个学习过程中所利用的资源。我们重复并扩展了之前强调概念构建和知识丰富之间差异的研究结果，并且发现执行功能能够预测在活力论测试中的进步，但不能预测在趣味事实测试中的进步；而接受性词汇量能够预测在趣味事实测试中的进步，但不能预测在活力论测试中的进步。这种双重分离为这两种知识获取方式的区别提供了新的证据，也与每种方式所涉及的学习机制的本质相关。
