Ling Daphne S, Wong Cole D, Diamond Adele
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Program, Department of Psychiatry, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jan 6;11:571891. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.571891. eCollection 2020.
That conditional, if-then reasoning does not emerge until 4-5 years has long been accepted. Here we show that children barely 3 years old can do conditional reasoning. All that was needed was a superficial change to the stimuli: When color was a property of the shapes (line drawings of a star and truck) rather than of the background (as in all past conditional discrimination [CD] testing), 3-year-olds could succeed. Three-year-olds do not seem to use color to inform them which shape is correct unless color is a property of the shapes themselves. While CD requires integrating color and shape information, the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task requires keeping those dimension cognitively separate - inhibiting attention to one (e.g., shape) when sorting by the other (e.g., color). For DCCS, a superficial change to the stimuli that is the inverse of what helps on CD enables 3-year-olds to succeed when normally they do not until years. As we and others have previously shown, 3-year-olds can succeed at DCCS when color is a property of the background (e.g., a white truck on a red background), instead of a property of the stimulus (e.g., a red truck on a white background, as in standard DCCS). Our findings on CD and DCCS suggest that scaffolding preschoolers' emerging conceptual skills by changing the way stimuli look (perceptual bootstrapping) enables 3-year-olds to demonstrate reasoning abilities long thought beyond their grasp. Evidently, children of 3 years have difficulty mentally separating dimensions (e.g., color and shape) of the same object and difficulty mentally integrating dimensions not part of the same object. Our present CD findings plus our earlier DCCS findings provide strong evidence against prominent cognitive complexity, conditional reasoning, and graded memory theories for why 3-year-olds fail these two tasks. The ways we have traditionally queried children may have obscured the budding reasoning competencies present at 3 years of age.
长期以来，人们一直认为条件性的“如果……那么……”推理直到4至5岁才会出现。在此我们表明，年仅3岁的儿童就能进行条件推理。所需要的只是对刺激物进行表面上的改变：当颜色是形状（星星和卡车的线条画）的属性而非背景的属性时（就像过去所有条件辨别[CD]测试那样），3岁的儿童就能成功。除非颜色是形状本身的属性，否则3岁的儿童似乎不会利用颜色来告知自己哪种形状是正确的。虽然CD要求整合颜色和形状信息，但维度变化卡片分类（DCCS）任务要求在认知上保持这些维度的分离——在按另一个维度（如颜色）进行分类时抑制对一个维度（如形状）的关注。对于DCCS，对刺激物进行与在CD中起帮助作用的改变相反的表面改变，能使3岁的儿童成功，而正常情况下他们直到几年后才会成功。正如我们和其他人之前所表明的，当颜色是背景的属性（如红色背景上的白色卡车）而非刺激物的属性（如白色背景上的红色卡车，如在标准DCCS中那样）时，3岁的儿童在DCCS中就能成功。我们在CD和DCCS方面的研究结果表明，通过改变刺激物的外观方式（感知引导）来搭建学前儿童新兴概念技能的脚手架，能使3岁的儿童展现出长期以来被认为超出其能力范围的推理能力。显然，3岁的儿童在心理上难以分离同一物体的维度（如颜色和形状），并且在心理上难以整合不属于同一物体的维度。我们目前在CD方面的研究结果加上我们早期在DCCS方面的研究结果，有力地反驳了关于3岁儿童为何在这两项任务中失败的突出认知复杂性、条件推理和分级记忆理论。我们传统上询问儿童的方式可能掩盖了3岁时就已存在的初现的推理能力。
