Creations of the Mind by Margolis & Laurence

Author:Margolis & Laurence
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

194

Jean M. Mandler

Figure 11.1. The models of birds and planes that 9-month-olds successfully categorize

Fivush, and Reznick 1987). This test is a developmental precursor to the sorting

tests used to study classification in older children. Using this task we showed

that, from 18 months to 24 months, infants are sensitive to the global categories

of animals and vehicles (Mandler, Bauer, and McDonough 1991). Within these

broad categories, infants also differentiate land, air, and sea animals, and land

and air vehicles (boats were not tested). It appears that there is a relatively early

tripartite division among land-, air-, and sea-animals (see also Oakes, Coppage,

and Dingel 1997), and at least a division between land and air vehicles. We

found little subcategorization within these broad categories (dogs versus horses

or rabbits, cars versus trucks or motorcycles) at 18 months, and up to 30 months

only about half the children categorized at this ‘basic’ level. It may be noted

that on this task, which is a more stringent test of conceptual categorization

than the object-examination task described above, vehicles were not divided into

individual kinds earlier than animals.

Other tests using this technique showed that 23-month-olds categorize animals

as different from plants, and kitchen utensils from furniture, but do not yet

categorize tools and musical instruments (Mandler, Bauer, and McDonough

1991). It is not that infants this age know nothing about the objects in these

latter categories—for example, they would hammer with the hammer and toot

the horn or ‘play’ the piano. But they did not react to tools and instruments as

Foundations of Animals and Artifacts

195

categories, choosing instead to do such things as to ‘fix’ the piano with pliers. This

kind of thematic play behavior was different from the systematic within-category

touching found with the other global categories studied. So although by age 2

children have learned some appropriate responses to a given musical instrument

or tool, they do not seem to see the overall relatedness of one instrument or tool

to another; at any rate they do not provide evidence on this test of having formed

an overall conception of tools or instruments as forming a common class (see

Hauser and Santos, this volume, for comparison with non-human primates, but

note that Hauser and Santos discuss the issue of whether non-human primates

have a concept of any tool, such as a hammer, whereas the experiment described

here concerned a higher-order category of tools that groups hammers and pliers

and wrenches together). We also looked at subcategorization within the plant,

furniture, kitchen utensil, and musical instrument categories. We contrasted

cactus and trees, tables and chairs, spoons and forks, and strings and horns, but

found no ‘basic-level’ categorization at 2 years of age on this task.

We also used the sequential touching task to study the associative categories

of kitchen things and bathroom things (Mandler, Fivush, and Reznick 1987).

We found that 14-month-olds distinguished these perceptually highly diverse

categories. These are not the usual taxonomic categories, of course, but are

based on household locations and/or the events that take place therein. Even

taxonomic categories may be at least partially based on location, for example, the

early division between land and air animals and vehicles. In a similar vein, Bauer

and I found that 16-month-olds categorize manipulable household objects as

different from vehicles on this task (Mandler 2002).

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