Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
Department of Psychology, Reed College, Portland, OR, United States.
Cognition. 2020 Feb;195:104090. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104090. Epub 2019 Nov 18.
There are two dissociable processes that underlie knowledge acquisition: knowledge enrichment, which involves learning information that can be represented with one's current conceptual repertoire; and conceptual construction, which involves acquiring knowledge that can only be represented in terms of concepts one does not yet possess. Theory changes involving conceptual change require conceptual construction. The cognitive mechanisms underlying conceptual change are still poorly understood, though executive function capacities have been implicated. The present study concerns the domain-general resources drawn upon in one well-studied case of the construction of a new framework theory in early childhood: the framework theory of vitalist biology, the ontogenetically earliest theory in which the concepts life and death come to have biological content shared with adults. Eighty-three five- and six-year-old children were tested on a battery of tasks that probe central concepts of the vitalist theory, as well as on a battery of tests of domain-general capacities that may be implicated in development in this domain, including measures of knowledge enrichment, executive function, and fluid IQ. With variance in accumulated knowledge and in knowledge enrichment capacity controlled, two specific executive functions, shifting and inhibition, predicted children's progress in constructing the vitalist theory. In contrast, working memory and fluid IQ were not associated with the acquisition of vitalist biology. These results provide further evidence for the distinction between knowledge enrichment and conceptual construction and impose new constraints on accounts of the mechanisms underlying conceptual construction in this domain.
知识丰富化，它涉及到学习可以用当前概念库来表示的信息；以及概念构建，它涉及到获取只能用尚未拥有的概念来表示的知识。涉及概念变化的理论变化需要概念构建。虽然执行功能能力已经被牵连进来，但概念变化的认知机制仍未被很好地理解。本研究涉及在儿童早期构建新框架理论的一个研究得很好的案例中所涉及的一般领域资源：生命力生物学的框架理论，是最早的在概念生命和死亡具有与成人共享的生物学内容的理论。83 名 5 岁和 6 岁的儿童接受了一系列测试，这些测试探查生命力理论的核心概念，以及一系列可能与该领域发展有关的一般领域能力测试，包括知识丰富度、执行功能和流体智商的衡量标准。在控制积累知识和知识丰富度能力的方差的情况下，两个特定的执行功能（转换和抑制）预测了儿童构建生命力理论的进展。相比之下，工作记忆和流体智商与生命力生物学的获取无关。这些结果进一步证明了知识丰富化和概念构建之间的区别，并对该领域概念构建机制的解释施加了新的限制。
