Summarize Psychology Article

Research Report

What Do Children Want to Know About Animals and Artifacts? Domain-Specific Requests for Information Marissa L. Greif,1 Deborah G. Kemler Nelson,2 Frank C. Keil,1 and Franky Gutierrez1

1 Yale University and

2 Swarthmore College

ABSTRACT—Children’s questions may reveal a great deal

about the characteristics of objects they consider to be

conceptually important. Thirty-two preschool children

were given opportunities to ask questions about unfamiliar

artifacts and animals. The children asked ambiguous

questions such as ‘‘What is it?’’ about artifacts and animals

alike. However, they were more likely to ask about the

functions of artifacts, but about category membership,

food choices, and typical locations of animals. They never

asked questions about either artifacts or animals that

would be considered inappropriate by adults. The results

indicate that children hold different expectations about the

types of information important for categorizing living and

artifact kinds. Young children conceive of artifacts in

terms of functions, but conceive of animals in terms of bi-

ologically appropriate characteristics. Such results speak

to debates about the role of function in children’s biological

reasoning and to accounts of children’s artifact concepts.

For adults, a core property that determines an artifact’s identity

is the purpose for which it was originally designed, an intuition

derived from what many researchers have referred to as the

design stance (Bloom, 1996; Dennett, 1987; German & Johnson,

2002; Keil, 1989). The centrality of functional design is said to

be exclusive to artifact kinds and perhaps to animal parts, and

for adults it does not tend to extend to whole animals (Keil,

1995). Controversies arise, however, about the role of function

and design in young children’s concepts of living and human-

made kinds. Do young children also see function as central to

understanding artifacts, and, more significantly, do they adopt a

different stance toward animals?

The current study brings new evidence to bear on both devel-

opmental issues. Following Kemler Nelson, Egan, and Holt

(2004), we examine the questions that children ask about objects.

Kemler Nelson et al. investigated the intent of children’s

ambiguous questions about novel artifacts, such as ‘‘What

is it?’’ Such questions could be requests for names or, alter-

natively, requests for information about object kinds. The re-

sults suggested that the inquiries were intended to elicit kind

information. In particular, when ambiguous questions elicited

names, 3- and 4-year-olds frequently followed up with questions

about the objects’ functions. Ambiguous questions eliciting in-

formation about function were never followed up with requests

for names.

If children’s questions about novel artifacts are intended to elicit

information about conceptual kinds, then one can adapt the

questioning procedure to address a new issue. By exploring non-

ambiguous questions children ask about artificial and living kinds,

one can gain insight into the kinds of properties children consider

fundamental to conceptual categorization in each domain.

Children as young as 3 years old have intuitions about es-

sential properties of living kinds and can distinguish them from

artifacts (Gelman, 2003). Extending the name of an animal

permits extension of other essential properties of the category,

such as manner of breathing (Gelman, 1988), aspects of growth

(Inagaki & Hatano, 1996; Inagaki & Sugiyama, 1988; Rosen-

gren, Gelman, Kalish, & McCormick, 1991), and inheritance

(Springer & Keil, 1989, 1991). Three-year-olds also understand

that traits of biological entities serve the purpose of enhancing

survival, and traits of artifacts serve the social purposes of

benefiting people (Keil, 1992, 1994).

Still, there is debate concerning the pervasiveness of

functional design in children’s concepts of living kinds. One

proposal is that young children ‘‘promiscuously’’ overextend

attributions of function, purpose, and design to all types of ob-

jects. Such a tendency is said to stem from an earlier proclivity

to understand the world in terms of intentions, or via a naive

Address correspondence to Marissa Greif, Department of Psycho- logical and Brain Sciences, Duke University, 9 Flowers Dr., Durham, NC 27708-0086, e-mail: [email protected].

P S Y C H O L O G I C A L S C I E N C E

Volume 17—Number 6 455Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science

psychology. According to this account, it is natural for children

to ask ‘‘What is it for?’’ for all objects, and children do appear to

judge statements of purpose and function as reasonable for a

wide array of objects (Kelemen, 1999a). To make inductive in-

ferences and provide explanations for the existence and emer-

gence of properties, children might treat living natural kinds as

‘‘quasi-artifacts’’ (Kelemen, 1999b) and engage the same tele-

ological mode of construal they use for human-made objects.

Alternatively, children may have an autonomous biological

mode of thought and limit teleological reasoning to features of

living entities that have adaptive value (Keil, 1992, 1994).

According to this discriminative-teleology account, even young

children restrict purpose-based thinking to artifacts and adap-

tive parts of animals.

If function and design are prominent elements of children’s

thinking about animals, as the promiscuous-teleology proposal

suggests, then one would expect children to be curious and ask

questions about animals’ purposes and functions, just as they do

for artifacts (Kemler Nelson et al., 2004). Accordingly, the

goal of the current research was to compare children’s requests

for kind information about novel artifacts and animals. We ex-

pected this comparison to shed light on whether or not children

privilege different types of information for living and artificial

things.

METHOD

Participants

The participants were 32 preschool children (mean age 5 4.62

years, range: 3.38–5.28 years), 12 girls and 20 boys. Data from 6

additional children were discounted because of shyness, speech

delays, or unwillingness to complete the protocol. Participants

were recruited from local preschools and a participant database

at Yale University.

Materials

Photographs

Pictures of eight unfamiliar animals and eight novel artifacts

were selected from the Internet and from Kemler Nelson’s pre-

vious studies (e.g., Kemler Nelson et al., 2004). Their unfa-

miliarity was confirmed by a group of adults. Each object was

removed from its original context (habitat or support) using

Adobe Photoshop and presented on a plain background, as

shown in Figure 1.

Game Presentation

A game display was created in PowerPoint and presented on a

laptop computer. The initial display was a screen containing a

Fig. 1. Pictures and descriptions of the stimuli.

456 Volume 17—Number 6

Children’s Domain-Specific Questions

3�4 matrix of boxes with question marks. Clicking a question mark prompted a new screen with a picture of an animal or artifact. The

stimulus set included six animals and six artifacts. Clicking on a

location that said ‘‘Play Again’’ brought back the initial game screen,

but without the options that had already been selected for view.

A similar training game included an initial screen containing

only a 2 � 2 arrangement of two animals and two artifacts.

Procedure

The children were told that they would be seeing pictures of new

things, and that they could ask questions about them. To elicit

curiosity about the display and make the children comfortable,

we used a humanlike puppet to demonstrate the game. With

the training screen in view, the puppet chose a box and looked

at the screen inquisitively while the experimenter clicked on

the corresponding question mark. When the picture was re-

vealed, the experimenter encouraged a question, saying ‘‘Wow,

look at that! What do you want to know about that thing?’’ The

puppet and experimenter inaudibly whispered questions and

answers about the picture to each other three times to show it

was acceptable to ask multiple questions about each object.

Questions and answers were not spoken aloud, to prevent

training on particular types of questions.

When the experimenter indicated it was the child’s turn, the

child chose a box, which then revealed a picture. The experi-

menter exclaimed, ‘‘Wow! That’s cool. What do you want to know

about that thing?’’ If the child did not respond, the experimenter

asked if there was anything the child wanted to know about the

picture. As a last resort, the experimenter said that asking

questions would help the puppet learn about the object.

The experimenter always answered the children’s questions.

Ambiguous questions (e.g., ‘‘What is it?’’) always elicited the

entity’s name. All other questions were answered with appro-

priate information. After answering the first question, the ex-

perimenter asked if the child had additional questions. The trial

continued until the child indicated he or she did not have more

questions or asked to move on. Then the initial screen was

brought up, and the child chose another box. The procedure was

repeated for the remaining two training boxes.

After training, the experimenter brought up the game screen

and told the child that he or she would see new items even more

interesting than the earlier ones. Then the procedure was re-

peated, just as in the training phase.

The children were randomly assigned to one of two picture

arrangements. The second arrangement was a mirror image of

the first along the diagonal. The children were allowed to choose

the boxes in any order they desired. All children saw all 12

pictures in the display.

RESULTS

Overall, 834 questions were asked, an average of 26.1 per child.

Seven hundred eight questions concerned whole objects (321

initial questions and 387 follow-ups), and 126 concerned parts

(24 initial questions and 102 follow-ups). Questions about whole

objects were coded into several categories; by adult standards,

some of these types of questions are appropriate for inquiring

about both animals and artifacts, whereas others are appropriate

for only animals or artifacts.

Questions Appropriate for Both Animals and Artifacts

The top panel of Table 1 lists the types of questions appropriate

for both kinds of objects. These include ambiguous requests for

names or information about kinds (e.g., ‘‘What is it?’’), requests

for names (e.g., ‘‘What is it called?’’), questions about nonspe-

cific functions or behaviors (e.g., ‘‘What does it do?’’) and

guesses about such actions (e.g., ‘‘Does it turn?’’ or ‘‘Does it

swim?’’), guesses about category membership (e.g., ‘‘Is it a

bear?’’ or ‘‘Is it scissors?’’), and questions about niche or location

(e.g., ‘‘Where does it live?’’ or ‘‘Where do you find it?’’). For each

type of question, the table shows the number of initial and fol-

low-up queries, listed separately for animals and artifacts.

The total number of initial or follow-up questions did not differ

reliably between animals and artifacts. Moreover, at a finer level

of analysis, the number of ambiguous questions and name re-

quests did not differ between the two kinds. However, despite

being appropriate to ask of both kinds, some question types

occurred at different rates for animals and artifacts. Questions

and guesses about functions and behaviors, taken together, were

more common for artifacts than animals, F(1, 31) 5 16.55,

prep 5 .96, Z 2

5 .35, for initial questions and F(1, 31) 5 18.58,

prep 5 .96, Z 2

5 .38, for follow-ups. By contrast, more animals

than artifacts elicited category guesses, F(1, 31) 5 5.39,

prep 5 .91, Z 2

5 .15, for initial questions and F(1, 31) 5 6.86,

prep 5 .93, Z 2

5 .18, for follow-ups. Additionally, more animals

than artifacts prompted follow-ups about niche or location,

F(1, 31) 5 4.31, prep 5 .89, Z 2

5 .12.

It is useful to partition guesses about functions and behaviors

according to whether they concerned actions that can be sensibly

predicated (by adults) of either kind (e.g., turning) or actions that

can be sensibly predicated of only one kind or the other (e.g.,

climbing trees or cutting). The frequencies of these types of

guesses are shown in the bottom panel of Table 1. Note that

children never guessed about one kind a predicate that was solely

applicable to the other kind. For example, types of behaviors ex-

pected of artifacts were not guessed for animals. Kind-specific

guesses accounted for virtually all the children’s guesses for ani-

mals. Although the same was not true for artifacts, fewer actions

associated with artifacts are kind-specific in general.

Questions Appropriate for Artifacts

The second panel of Table 1 lists types of questions that, by adult

standards, are appropriate to ask only about whole objects that

are artifacts. These include questions about intended function

(e.g., ‘‘What is this for?’’), guesses about intended function (e.g.,

‘‘Is this for X-ing?’’), and questions about typical use (‘‘How does

this work?’’). Although these types of questions were not asked

Volume 17—Number 6 457

M.L. Greif et al.

frequently, no such questions were ever asked about animals,

whereas they sometimes occurred in reference to artifacts.

Questions Appropriate for Animals

The third panel of Table 1 shows the frequency of questions that,

by adult standards, apply appropriately only to animals: ques-

tions about eating behavior and reproduction. Questions about

eating behavior were asked with moderate frequency for ani-

mals, but questions of both types never occurred for artifacts.

Questions About Parts

We also inspected children’s questions about parts. Overall,

both the number of initial questions and the number of follow-up

questions about parts were similar for animals and artifacts. Of

specific interest is whether children asked questions about

purposes and functions of animal parts more frequently than

they inquired about functions and behaviors of whole animals.

For all children who asked questions about animal parts, we

computed the proportion of their part questions that were about

functions, and we compared these proportions with the propor-

tions of questions about whole animals that were about functions

and behaviors. Children asked proportionally more function

questions about animal parts (M 5 .55, SD 5 .45) than wholes

(M 5 .12, SD 5 .17), t(16) 5 3.77, prep 5 .98, Z 2

5 .47. In

contrast, there was no difference in the proportion of function

questions asked about artifact parts (M 5 .66, SD 5 .369) and

wholes (M 5 .51, SD 5 .206), t(10) 5 1.20, prep 5 .67, Z 2

5 .13.

DISCUSSION

Our central finding concerns the distinction between animals

and artifacts in preschool children’s lines of questioning about

novel objects, and the relevance of this distinction to dis-

agreements about the role of teleological reasoning in children’s

thinking about biological concepts. We found that preschool

children seek out different information about animals and arti-

facts. As Kemler et al. (2004) found, preschoolers frequently

asked about the functions of artifacts. However, they did not

indiscriminately impute design and function to biological kinds.

Accordingly, the current findings support the discriminative-

teleology proposal (Keil, 1992, 1994), rather than the promis-

cuous-teleology proposal (Kelemen, 1999a, 1999b).

Children appear to understand that different kinds of abstract

relations are essential to the domains of artifacts and animals,

and their questions reveal a deep-seated conceptual contrast

between animals and artifacts. Children’s questions reveal what

they themselves consider important in creating a new concep-

tual category. Children were more likely to ask questions about

functions and potential behaviors of artifacts than to ask ques-

tions about functions and potential behaviors of animals.

Questions sensible to ask of either kind, such as ‘‘What does it

do?’’ occurred more often for artifacts than animals, an indica-

tion that children consider function to be more central to con-

cepts of artifacts than to concepts of animals. Function questions

were more frequent for animal parts than for whole animals.

Additionally, children occasionally asked what artifacts were

TABLE 1

Frequencies of Question Types, by Type of Object

Question type

Animal Artifact

Initial question

Follow-up question Total

Initial question

Follow-up question Total

Questions relevant to both kinds

Ambiguous 78 36 114 82 33 115

Name 6 6 12 6 4 10

Function or behavior 6 39 45 26 95 121

Guesses about function or behavior 1 20 21 13 27 40

Category guess 46 43 89 30 14 44

Niche or location 3 12 15 0 1 1

Questions relevant to artifacts

Intended function 0 0 0 5 2 7

Guesses about intended function 0 0 0 5 3 8

Typical function 0 0 0 0 6 6

Questions relevant to animals

Eating behavior 13 43 56 0 0 0

Reproduction 1 3 4 0 0 0

Guesses about functions and behaviors

Animal-specific 1 19 20 0 0 0

Artifact-specific 0 0 0 5 10 15

Ambiguous 0 1 1 8 17 25

Note. Only questions about whole objects are included in this table.

458 Volume 17—Number 6

Children’s Domain-Specific Questions

designed for or how they worked, but never made such inquiries

about animals. In contrast, children were more likely to ask

where animals typically were found than where artifacts typi-

cally were found. This question, although certainly sensible to

ask about artifacts, does not strike children as conceptually

important to learning about novel artifacts. Children also asked

about properties that could pertain only to animals, such as

eating habits and reproduction, and focused these queries ap-

propriately and exclusively toward animals in the stimulus set.

Preschool children may not be able to verbalize the abstract

differences between causal patterns associated with living kinds

and with artifacts, but this inability should not be confused with

problems in understanding such differences or with an inter-

pretive system that applies in the same way to these two kinds.

Instead, as evidenced in their questions, preschoolers show a

rich and sharply contrasting pattern of differences in their ex-

pectations about the kinds of information important for learning

about these two kinds. Further, the questions cluster together in

ways that suggest coherent sets of expectations about the two

kinds. Thus, at a young age, children have a clear sense of how

explanatory systems differ for these very broad and abstract

categories that represent one of the most important contrasts in

the world.

Acknowledgments—The authors thank Stacy Brock for as-

sistance with coding. This research was supported by funds from

Swarthmore College to D.G.K.N. and National Institutes of

Health Grant R37HD023922 to F.C.K.

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