Specifying the domain-general resources that contribute to conceptual construction: Evidence from the child's acquisition of vitalist biology.

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.

The role of domain-general cognitive resources in children's construction of a vitalist theory of biology.

Some episodes of learning are easier than others. Preschoolers can learn certain facts, such as "my grandmother gave me this purse," only after one or two exposures (easy to learn; fast mapping), but they require several years to learn that plants are alive or that the sun is not alive (hard to learn). One difference between the two kinds of knowledge acquisition is that hard cases often require conceptual construction, such as the construction of the biological concept alive, whereas easy cases merely involve forming new beliefs formulated over concepts the child already has (belief revision, a form of knowledge enrichment). We asked whether different domain-general cognitive resources support these two types of knowledge acquisition (conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment that supports fast mapping) by testing 82 6-year-olds in a pre-training/training/post-training study. We measured children's improvement in an episode involving theory construction (the beginning steps of acquisition of the framework theory of vitalist biology, which requires conceptual change) and in an episode involving knowledge enrichment alone (acquisition of little known facts about animals, such as the location of crickets' ears and the color of octopus blood). In addition, we measured children's executive functions and receptive vocabulary to directly compare the resources drawn upon in the two episodes of learning. We replicated and extended previous findings highlighting the differences between conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment, and we found that Executive Functions predict improvement on the Vitalism battery but not on the Fun Facts battery and that Receptive Vocabulary predicts improvement the Fun Facts battery but not on the Vitalism battery. This double dissociation provides new evidence for the distinction between the two types of knowledge acquisition, and bears on the nature of the learning mechanisms involved in each.

Some consequences of normal aging for generating conceptual explanations: A case study of vitalist biology.

Accumulating evidence suggests that not only diseases of old age, but also normal aging, affect elderly adults' ability to draw on the framework theories that structure our abstract causal-explanatory knowledge, knowledge that we use to make sense of the world. One such framework theory, the cross-culturally universal vitalist biology, gives meaning to the abstract concepts life and death. Previous work shows that many elderly adults are animists, claiming that active, moving entities such as the sun and the wind are alive (Zaitchik & Solomon, 2008). Such responses are characteristic of young children, who, lacking an intuitive theory of biology, distinguish animals from non-animals on the basis of a theory of causal and intentional agency. What explains such childlike responses? Do the elderly undergo semantic degradation of their intuitive biological theory? Or do they merely have difficulty deploying their theory of biology in the face of interference from the developmentally prior agency theory? Here we develop an analytic strategy to answer this question. Using a battery of vitalist biology tasks, this study demonstrates-for the first time-that animism in the elderly is due to difficulty in deployment of the vitalist theory, not its degradation. We additionally establish some powerful downstream consequences of theory deployment difficulties, demonstrating that the elderly's use of the agency theory is not restricted to animist judgments-rather, it pervades their explicit reasoning about animates and inanimates. Extending the investigation, we identify specific cognitive mechanisms implicated in adult animism, finding that differences between young and elderly adults are mediated and moderated by differences in inhibition and shifting mechanisms. The analytic strategy developed here could help adjudicate between degradation and deployment in other conceptual domains and other populations.

The effect of executive function on biological reasoning in young children: an individual differences study.

There is substantial variance in the age at which children construct and deploy their first explicit theory of biology. This study tests the hypothesis that this variance is due, at least in part, to individual differences in their executive function (EF) abilities. A group of 79 boys and girls aged 5-7 years (with a mean age of 6½ years) were presented with two test batteries: (a) a biology battery that probed their understanding of life, death, and body functions and (b) an EF battery that tested working memory, inhibition, and set-shifting skills. Individuals' EF scores significantly predict their biology scores, even after controlling for age and verbal IQ.

Folkbiology.

Recent work in cognitive science suggests that children have framework theories unique to specific domains such as physics, psychology, and biology that provide causal explanations and support predictions about phenomena within them. They further guide how children develop the later theories of adults, both formal and informal. In this article, we focus on a particular framework or naïve theory, folkbiology, and review debates concerning how it ought best to be characterized, its origins and developmental course, whether aspects of it can be said to be universal to people in all cultural settings, how it informs our understanding of the brain, and what implications it has for science education. In so doing, we discuss how the cognitive scientific study of folkbiology takes us across disciplinary bounds into related work in the philosophy of science, cultural anthropology, neuropsychology, and education. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012, 3:105-115. doi: 10.1002/wcs.150 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Mental state attribution and the temporoparietal junction: an fMRI study comparing belief, emotion, and perception.

By age 2, children attribute referential mental states such as perceptions and emotions to themselves and others, yet it is not until age 4 that they attribute representational mental states such as beliefs. This raises an interesting question: is attribution of beliefs different from attribution of perceptions and emotions in terms of its neural substrate? To address this question with a high degree of anatomic specificity, we partitioned the TPJ, a broad area often found to be recruited in theory of mind tasks, into 2 neuroanatomically specific regions of interest: Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS) and Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL). To maximize behavioral specificity, we designed a tightly controlled verbal task comprised of sets of single sentences--sentences identical except for the type of mental state specified in the verb (belief, emotion, perception, syntax control). Results indicated that attribution of beliefs more strongly recruited both regions of interest than did emotions or perceptions. This is especially surprising with respect to STS, since it is widely reported in the literature to mediate the detection of referential states--among them emotions and perceptions--rather than the inference of beliefs. An explanation is offered that focuses on the differences between verbal stimuli and visual stimuli, and between a process of sentence comprehension and a process of visual detection.

Conservation of species, volume, and belief in patients with Alzheimer's disease: the issue of domain specificity and conceptual impairment.

Two studies investigated whether patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) suffer high-level and category-specific impairment in the conceptual domain of living things. In Experiment 1, AD patients and healthy young and healthy elderly controls took part in three tasks: the conservation of species, volume, and belief. All 3 tasks required tracking an object's identity in the face of irrelevant but salient transformations. Healthy young and elderly controls performed at or near ceiling on all tasks. AD patients were at or near ceiling on the volume and belief tasks, but only about half succeeded on the species task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the results were not due to simple task demands. AD patients' failure to conserve species indicates that they are impaired in their theoretical understanding of living things, and their success on the volume and belief tasks suggests that the impairment is domain-specific. Two hypotheses are put forward to explain the phenomenon: The first, a category-specific account, holds that the intuitive theory of biology undergoes pervasive degradation; the second, a hybrid domain-general/domain-specific account, holds that impairment to domain-general processes such as executive function interacts with core cognition, the primitive elements that are the foundation of domain-specific knowledge.

Animist thinking in the elderly and in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Some patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) reveal low-level impairment in their concepts of living things (i.e., forgetting that zebras are striped). To test for more profound impairment, we investigated the concept alive--a "higher order" concept spanning every member of the domain. Many elderly controls were animists, attributing life to inanimates capable of self-generated activity (the sun, fire). Most AD patients were animists, with half even attributing life to inanimates whose activity is not self-generated (cars, lamps). Adult animists, like young children who have not yet acquired biological concepts, overattributed life to active inanimates. We believe this reflects an innate disposition to view active entities as agents, and that agency interferes with the biological concept alive. This interference, we suggest, reflects degradation of biological concepts in the face of spared perception of agents. It sheds light on the nature of fundamental questions concerning conceptual organization, innate endowment, and conceptual change.

Inferring design: evidence of a preference for teleological explanations in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Unlike educated adults, young children demonstrate a "promiscuous" tendency to explain objects and phenomena by reference to functions, endorsing what are called teleological explanations. This tendency becomes more selective as children acquire increasingly coherent beliefs about causal mechanisms, but it is unknown whether a widespread preference for teleology is ever truly outgrown. The study reported here investigated this question by examining explanatory judgments in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), whose dementia affects the rich causal beliefs adults typically consult in evaluating explanations. The results indicate that unlike healthy adults, AD patients systematically and promiscuously prefer teleological explanations, suggesting that an underlying tendency to construe the world in terms of functions persists throughout life. This finding has broad relevance not only to understanding conceptual impairments in AD, but also to theories of development, learning, and conceptual change. Moreover, this finding sheds light on the intuitive appeal of creationism.

Inference of beliefs and emotions in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

The present study compared 20 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease with 20 older controls (ages 69-94 years) on their ability to make inferences about emotions and beliefs in others. Six tasks tested their ability to make 1st-order and 2nd-order inferences as well as to offer explanations and moral evaluations of human action by appeal to emotions and beliefs. Results showed that the ability to infer emotions and beliefs in 1st-order tasks remains largely intact in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's. Patients were able to use mental states in the prediction, explanation, and moral evaluation of behavior. Impairment on 2nd-order tasks involving inference of mental states was equivalent to impairment on control tasks, suggesting that patients' difficulty is secondary to their cognitive impairments. ((c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).

Inference of mental states in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

INTRODUCTION: The ability to determine what someone thinks or knows often requires an individual to infer the mental state of another person, an ability typically referred to as one's "theory of mind". The present study tests this ability in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHODS: Three theory of mind tests and three standardised neuropsychological tests were presented to a group of patients with AD (n = 25) and a group of healthy elderly controls (n = 15). RESULTS: On the first two theory of mind tasks, the performance of the AD patients was nearly perfect and did not differ from that of the controls: AD patients showed no difficulties in either attributing a false belief to another person, or in recognising their own previous false beliefs. On the third theory of mind task, where the key information was embedded in a story narrative, AD patients per formed significantly worse than controls. However, their performance on this task was similar to the control condition, which used a similar story but which did not involve beliefs. CONCLUSIONS: These results, as well as those involving correlations between the neuropsychological tests and performance on the third task, suggest that the AD patients' difficulty may be secondary to their cognitive impairments, rather than a primary impairment in theory of mind.

Psychiatric symptomatology and prodromal Alzheimer's disease.

The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of psychiatric symptoms among nondemented individuals with memory changes and whether such symptoms predict progression of functional decline or diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD). A semi-structured interview was administered at baseline to controls (n = 32) and to nondemented subjects with memory changes (n = 112) and to each subject's collateral source. The interview assessed the impact of cognition on functional abilities in daily life and a variety of psychiatric symptoms, including symptoms of psychosis, depression, and personality change. Participants were followed annually for 3 years to determine who had progressive functional decline and who progressed to meet clinical criteria for AD. Those diagnosed with AD on follow-up had more symptoms of personality change, such as agitation and passivity, at baseline than those who did not progress to meet clinical criteria for AD. Mild depressive symptoms were also more common among individuals at baseline who subsequently 'converted' to AD. Symptoms of personality change were associated with a more rapid increase in functional difficulty over time, whereas depressive symptoms were not. Changes in personality are more common among subjects with memory changes who go on to develop AD. Particular types of personality change, such as agitation and passivity, are related to progression of functional difficulty over time. Depressive symptoms, although common in prodromal AD, are not associated with a more rapid functional decline.