Learning from others: children's construction of concepts.

By Susan A. Gelman. 2009

386 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Much of children’s knowledge is derived not from their direct experiences with the environment but rather from the input of others. However, until recently, the focus in studies of concept development was primarily on children’s knowledge, with relatively little attention paid to the nature of the input. The last 10 years have seen an important shift in focus. This chapter reviews this approach, by examining the nature of the input, and the nature of the learner, to shed light on early conceptual learning. These findings argue against the simple notion that conceptual development is either supplied by the environment or innately specified, and instead demonstrate how the two work together. The implications for how children reconcile competing belief systems are also discussed.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Imitation Learning: A Survey of Learning Methods, Environments and Metrics (2024, neutral): “One of these learning approaches comes intuitively to humans: learning by observing, which is a skill humans develop quite early (as children and newborns) to learn how to walk and talk [42].”
Psychological Construction: The Darwinian Approach to the Science of Emotion (2013, background): “…not be surprising, given that essentializing is a basic phenomenon that develops early in human cognition and applies to many types of categories (Gelman, 2009), and may have its basis in the way that infants as young as 6 months old learn to use words as “essence placeholders” (e.g., Booth &…”
Young Children's Deference to a Consensus Varies by Culture and Judgment Setting (2013, background): “Nevertheless, children also use other people as information sources (Gelman, 2009; Harris, 2012).”
Children's additive concepts: Promoting understanding and the role of inhibition (2013, background): “Children often critique information they are presented with before adopting that information (Gelman, 2009) but previous research has not examined children's evaluations of the information they are given during inversion concept training.”
A unified theory of development: a dialectic integration of nature and nurture. (2010, background): “Children’s cognition to a large extent is not derived from direct experiences with the environment but based on interpretations provided by others (Gelman, 2009).”
Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA (2011, background): “While pure essentialism has been dismissed as metaphysically problematic (see Medin & Ortony, 1989, for a lucid explanation), psychological essentialism reflects how people routinely think about and categorize members of groups (Gelman, 2009).”
What Plants and Animals Do Early Childhood and Primary Students’ Name? Where Do They See Them? (2011, neutral): “interactions within their local community form part of their real world knowledge concerning biological phenomena (Gelman 2009).”
PROST: Physical Reasoning about Objects through Space and Time (2021, background): “These concepts are then linked with words to enable communication, eventually providing the necessary grounds for concepts and language to co-develop (Bloom, 2002; Gelman, 2009).”
The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models (2022, background): “Researchers disagree on the extent to which concepts are domain-specific and innate versus more general-purpose and learned [14, 30, 31, 53, 75, 85], the degree to which concepts are grounded via embodied metaphors [28, 46, 61], are represented in the brain via dynamic, situation-based simulations [”